Someone Help, Finder giving me trouble

[Clockworked]

Hey guys,
Need a hand here. I just noticed recently that whenever I hit ctrl+mouse click to get the same effect as right clicking (in finder), that finder closes the window I'm looking at and restarts. If i do it to a file on the desktop, the files all disappear leaving only my wallpaper showing completely, the finder bar at the top disappears for a second, reappears, then shows me the connected drives as per usual on boot up. I really need to be able to ctrl click because usually I want to manually select how to open the file, and it's just such a hastle going to the top and selecting it from the drop down menus. Any ideas?

I have no idea whether it has anything to do with anything I installed recently :S because I have no idea when it started happening. As far as I know it only started happening recently.

P.S. I'm running on 10.4.2.

Thanks

 

[Mitthrawnuruodo]

I would start with the usual bag of tricks:
- restart
- repair permissions, then restart
- delete (or move) ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.finder.plist (where ~/ means your users home folder), then restart

If non of that helps: Log into another user account on the Mac (make one if necessary) and see if the problem persists.

 

[Clockworked]

I would start with the usual bag of tricks:
- restart
- repair permissions, then restart
- delete (or move) ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.finder.plist (where ~/ means your users home folder), then restart

If non of that helps: Log into another user account on the Mac (make one if necessary) and see if the problem persists.

What does it mean to "repair permissions?"

Sorry, totally new to all of this so I don't even know what you mean by the usual bag of tricks

 

[eva01]

/applications/utilities/Disk Utility.app

Repair permissions from that program

 

[VanNess]

A quick check would be to go to /library/contextual menu items

If you see anything in there, move it to the desktop. Log out and in then see if you still have the problem. If not, then whatever you dragged out of the contextual menu items folder was the likely troublemaker.

 

[Clockworked]

A quick check would be to go to /library/contextual menu items

If you see anything in there, move it to the desktop. Log out and in then see if you still have the problem. If not, then whatever you dragged out of the contextual menu items folder was the likely troublemaker.

Hey, I found the problem it was some stuffit plugin... but now I'm wondering, exactly what do I do with the file, now that I know which one it is? Do I move it back? delete it? plugin sounds sort of important so I'm assuming I keep it on the harddrive, but where exactly?

Thanks all

 

[beatle888]

Hey, I found the problem it was some stuffit plugin... but now I'm wondering, exactly what do I do with the file, now that I know which one it is? Do I move it back? delete it? plugin sounds sort of important so I'm assuming I keep it on the harddrive, but where exactly?

Thanks all

good going. nice to see a newbie solve such an involved problem. thats pretty tricky to pin point it to a contextual menu plugin. those plugins only ad functionality to the quick access contextual menu feature. stuffit must of added that little plugin to the contextual menu folder thinking that you would want it in there. personally i dont think they should mess with your system like that and think its pretty rude of them to install it without ASKING. i think it would serve their customers better if they gave us that option during the installation process, or maybe just add it if you turn a preference on. anyway, glad things worked out.