Finder crashes when clicking on Applications folder

Question

VERY weird. Beginning a few days ago the finder on my Mac Pro crashes whenever I clicked on the Applications folder. It makes no difference what finder view I am using (icons, columns, etc.). Even if I click on the alias to the Applications folder in the sidebar, the finder crashes. I cannot view the contents of that folder by any method. The only way I can get to an item contained therein is to search for it using Spotlight.
Thinking that maybe my startup disk was hosed somehow, I ran Disk Utility (repaired permissions and verified the disk) and ran all tests within TechTool Deluxe. Both said the disk and filesystem were fine.
I tried copying the entire folder to another disk, but the copy aborts after the first few items (stops with Adobe Photoshop; the next item alphabetically is Aperture). In case Aperture was somehow a problem, I removed it (searched using Spotlight and then dragged it to the trash). No change in behavior.
I used Carbon Copy Cloner to replicate the entire drive to another, newly reformatted drive and made that drive the startup disk. No change in behavior.
It sure seems that the issue has to do with some kind of file corruption (that CCC dutifully replicated) rather than a faulty drive, but I have no idea where to look next for a solution (other than reformatting and reinstalling over 100 applications from scratch; ugh).
Does anyone have any idea what may be going on here? Until I can fix this, the Mac Pro is pretty much useless (luckily, I also have a MacBook Pro).

Answer 1

Hi - I too am having this issue. 
When I click on any of the items in my sidebar (i.e. -desktop, documents, applications, etc...) this causes the finder to crash and restart. 
I have tried trashing the com.apple.finder.plist and running disk utility but to no avail.  I also found this other forum discussion (https://discussions.apple.com/thread/1336291?start=0&tstart=0) Where this was part of the post
  petrock
Re: finder crashes when clicking desktop icon in sidebar - any help? 
Feb 2, 2008 3:43 PM (in response to choegl)
choegl, that crash is the same place as andreas's but it got there in a different manor. In the manor I would expect it to. It is trying to retarget the window to your selection in the sidebar and setup List View according to the view options for that folder from that folder's .DS_Store. Its specifically trying to get the label for one of the columns in List View (i.e. Size or Name or Date Modified) but the value it gets from the .DS_Store is corrupt/bogus and causes the Finder to crash (specifically a component underneath the Finder call CoreFoundation via a call to CFStringGetLength). Here's how you solve your problem. In /Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app type: +cd <path to problem folder>+
+rm .DS_Store+
+killall Finder+ Pressing return after each line. You can get the path to the problem folder by drag/dropping the folder into the Terminal window. When the Finder comes back up, see if it still crashes when you click on that problem folder (i.e. your Desktop) in the sidebar. Repeat the steps above for any other folders that behave this way when you click on them in the sidebar. Hope that helps everyone... 
btw, I wrote up a bug report on your behalf about this issue and sent it off to Apple (# 5721669)."
I tried this as well and nothing! 
Anyone have any suggestions?  I'm at a loss and am hating this issue!  BTW, if I right click on any of the items in the sidebar, I can then click on open to get the folder to open.  HASSLE!  and if I forget (which is likely since I move too fast for my own good) then I crash the finder.  Also, this happens on all the users on my mac. 
Thanks!!!!
Matthew
MacBookPro 2,2 - OS X 10.6.8 - 2.16 GHz - 3 GB mem -