mac constantly switching to new finder window

[jules118]

For the last 48 hours, my mac will constantly switch to a 'new' finder window every few minutes. I'll be typing away and then bang, I am back on the finder window and my application will be in the background, so I will have to click back on the application to continue working. It's extremely frustrating and I don't have a clue how to fix the problem. Help????

 

[JediMeister]

Made any software/hardware changes recently? Is there anything physically connected to the system that wasn't 48 hrs ago? What word processing application are you in, is it Tiger 10.4 or Leopard 10.5? We need a lot more information on hand to troubleshoot.

 

[Blants]

I face exactly the same problem without having made any software change, update etc. It happens with all applications (word, firefox etc.; even when I watch a dvd movie in full screen every few minutes it switches to the finder; it happens even now that I'm writing this reply..). As far as I remember, the only thing that I had done before this problem appeared was installing Skype. However, the problem appears without having Skype open.

My system is: Mac OS X 10.4.11; and the model is PowerBook G4 15", PowerBook5,8.

Do you have any clue what may happen?
Thanks.

 

[hoowie]

This has started to happen to me as well.

As I'm typing this, in Safari, the application will suddenly jump to the Finder and the rest of the senten


Did you see what happened there? It doesn't matter which application I'm in, it will suddenly go to the back and the Finder will become the highlihted window.

I'm using a Powerbook G4 1.67GHz with 512 MB DDR2 SDRAM. The problem arises even if there is only one application open. The problem is probably due to my own attempts to solve other issues. At work I was blocked out of the network and a message said that my powerbook was making potentially harmful requests; possibly due to a virus or trojan.

Trying to figure out what was going on, I remembered that I'd been getting a strange message on preferences/network settings. It said "Your network settings have been changed by another application" and would not let me change the settings or even close down preferences. I found a fix for this at

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1710040&tstart=0

where I found the following advice:

"Go to Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration and delete the following (suggest make copies to the desktop first if in doubt):

com.apple.airport.preferences.plist
NetworkInterfaces.plist
preferences.plist
com.apple.nat.plist"

I deleted the files and it did indeed get rid of the annoying message that my network preferences had been changed by another application. However, since then, I've been getting the application switching problem.

I store all my documents on dotmac and I have an external hard drive with all my music and photos etc so I'm very tempted to just reinstall MacOSx from scratch.

Any suggestions?