Finder unresponsive, but other applications can find files fine

[Ravich]

Disclaimer: I have a mac pro with multiple hard drives.

As of very recently, I noticed that the finder would basically freeze under certain circumstances. When I force it to relaunch, it starts with the desktop folder highlighted, and that works fine. Applications folder also is accessible, as is dropbox.

But when I click on my "home/profile" folder or google drive, it stops responding. Sometimes I can get it to highlight other folders but it will still display nothing. Other times it will just freeze. The X button in the corner of the window is immediately unresponsive as soon as this starts happening.

I just cloned my hard drive with my home folder/profile on it (different from boot drive) but that didnt seem to fix the problem. It's a bit odd because my desktop is on that hard drive, so I cant see why it would be perfectly responsive, but my documents folder, etc, wouldnt be, especially when you consider that I can access any file (as far as I'm aware) on the hard drive as long as it's through another program.

Any experience with this?


Edit: oh for the love of god. One final relaunch for additional testing and everything is working perfectly all of a sudden.

 

[Ravich]

It's doing it again, so the hard drive was not the problem, but it's still very inconsistent. I cant figure out what is causing it to happen or not happen when I relaunch the finder.

 

[BrianBaughn]

As a general response I'll just say that my former Mavericks installation ran into finder issues that I got tired of chasing down. In my case, a completely clean install took care of it.

You could try a new, test User Account to see if you can point to your own account as the issue. In my case, the problems didn't go away.

 

[Ravich]

A clean install seems worth trying. Currently, it's doing this again:

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/black-screen-when-i-hold-option-when-booting.1934583/


Last time it suddenly fixed itself for no apparent reason. Tried popping in the new graphics card again (why not) and it booted into windows safe mode. Made no sense.

Could be related to this, could be unrelated.



Edit: for the record, signing into another user does not cause problems with the finder. Is it possible that issues are being caused by google drive or something like that? At the moment it seems like the problem is particular to my particular user, since navigating through hard drives on another user causes zero problems.