Big problems stemming from Google Update Checker -- any ideas?

Question

Hello,
My computer is having severe issues after receiving an error message involving Google Update Checker. Please let me know if you have any idea how to solve my problems!
So yesterday while working on my computer with many programs running (Finder, Safari, Firefox, X11, Matlab, Mail, Bibdesk, TexShop, Desktop Manager, RSS Menu, possibly others) I received an Error Message saying close the following:
"The Google program Google Update Checker has quit unexpectedly. A report has been made and is ready to be sent", with options to "cancel" or "send report".
At first, I clicked cancel. Between 30-60 minutes later I received the same message, I pressed cancel, then again, and I pressed "send report". I restarted, shut down then restarted, restarted again and still received the message. Long story short, I kept getting the same error message every half hour or so.
Finally I went to Applications and manually put "Google Update" in the trash, since the only google software that I explicitly know of on my computer is Google Earth and Gmail Checker, neither of which I had run recently. This turned out to be a good idea, and now Finder continually stops responding and relaunches. It does so frequently enough that I am unable to open the trash to restore the Google Update app, or a finder window at all. Additionally, using Activity Monitor it says that FInder is using 99% of my CPU.
I tried to restart it in safe mode by holding down "Shift" when booting, but OS X never booted in this circumstance.
Any help on this matter would be greatly, greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance,
-Patrick

Answer 1

BDAqua,
Thanks for setting me straight on the dual cores
I went ahead and created a new Admin account. When I logged in with that account I had zero problems and everything behaved beautifully. I checked the "login items" on this account and none were present, so I went back to my normal account and removed login items (nine total) one by one, logging out and logging back in between each try. Even with no "login items" present, the problem persisted.
I went back to Activity Monitor to check which processes were running, and saw the following:
Activity Monitor
SystemUIServer
UniversalAccess.app
loginwindow
ATSServer
pbs
mdimport
launchd
Google Update Helper
I logged back out and logged into the diagnostic account (again, no problems with Finder) and checked the Active Processes. There were the exact same processes running in that case, too.
When I opened Console, Finder was already doing its crashing routine, so here is a tiny tidbit from the Console:
{quote}
2008-09-13 00:54:25 -0700
2008-09-13 00:54:26.496 SystemUIServer[957] lang is:en
Sep 13 00:54:26 computer-name crashdump[963]: Finder crashed
Sep 13 00:54:28 computer-name crashdump[963]: crash report written to: /Users/username/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/Finder.crash.log
Sep 13 00:54:29 computer-name crashdump[967]: Finder crashed
Sep 13 00:54:29 computer-name crashdump[967]: crash report written to: /Users/username/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/Finder.crash.log
Sep 13 00:54:30 computer-name crashdump[969]: Finder crashed
Sep 13 00:54:30 computer-name crashdump[969]: crash report written to: /Users/username/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/Finder.crash.log
2008-09-13 00:54:31.034 Finder[970] * +[NSCFString objectForKey:]: selector not recognized
2008-09-13 00:54:31.034 Finder[970] * Uncaught exception: <NSInvalidArgumentException> >* +[NSCFString objectForKey:]: selector not recognized
Sep 13 00:54:31 computer-name crashdump[971]: Finder crashed
Sep 13 00:54:31 computer-name crashdump[971]: crash report written to: /Users/username/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/Finder.crash.log
Finder(972,0xafe4c000) malloc: * error for object 0x67f180: incorrect checksum for freed object - object was probably modified after being freed, break at szone_error to debug
Finder(972,0xafe4c000) malloc: * set a breakpoint in szone_error to debug
Finder(972,0xafe4c000) malloc: * error for object 0x62c840: double free
Finder(972,0xafe4c000) malloc: * set a breakpoint in szone_error to debug
Finder(972,0xafe4c000) malloc: * error for object 0x62c840: incorrect checksum for freed object - object was probably modified after being freed, break at szone_error to debug
Finder(972,0xafe4c000) malloc: * set a breakpoint in szone_error to debug
Sep 13 00:54:32 computer-name crashdump[973]: Finder crashed
Sep 13 00:54:32 computer-name crashdump[973]: crash report written to: /Users/username/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/Finder.crash.log
Looks pretty ugly to this amateur eye...