Today I was using my MacBook Pro for work as per normal, when I noticed the Finder windows crashing every minute or so. I tried many things, including:
- Deleting misc plists from my
~/Library/Preferencesdirectory; - Rebooting in Safe Mode (Hold Shift while rebooting);
- Restoring the System Fonts while in Safe Mode;
- Validating the Fonts within FontBook (Found one corrupt one);
- Deleting every single
.DS_Storefile on the Mac; - Trying to diagnose the issue from the Crash Report in the Console.
All to no avail, although I did discover something interesting, of which more anon.
Finally, I waded into the Apple Support Forums, searching on some of the terms I found in the crash reports and I finally found a solution to Finder Crashing Every Minute: Basically, turn off "show file status icons and right click menu" in the Google Drive Preferences. This instantly stopped the problems.
The interesting thing I found? My ~/Library/Preferences directory was full of locked files, and once I deleted all the *.lockfile files, quite a few apps were much faster to open, and several websites dramatically changed their fonts. Perhaps I had overwritten the default font for some of them, as they went from being a nice Helvetica to Verdana.