Finder stopped working altogether, and can't see Volumes on desktop

Question

I cannot open a finder window and I can't open any folders on the desktop either and my harddrives aren't showing up.
I updated to 10.4.5, I also recently turned on "see hidden files" but later turned it off
Another weird circumstance was for a few sessions all my desktop icons were very pale in color, thats gone away, now its just the finder issue, which incidentally makes my machine run like crap when I AM able to open something from dock.

Answer 1

Had a similar situation. Spinning beach ball in finder, no icons on desktop, not even the hard drive. Turns out it was a problem with something I had tried to move out of the trash to the desktop -- a font I was trying to eliminate while running FontDoctor.
Solution was to change startup disk to a bootable external firewire hard drive and restart. (If you don't have an external bootable drive, but have access to another Mac, then you can have your computer's hard drive show up as a desktop icon on the other computer by powering down your computer, connecting it to the other computer via Firewire and powering up again while holding down the T key.)
With the external drive as the startup disk, I was able to access my hard drive / users / my name / desktop. From there I dragged the offending font to the trash in the dock of the external drive and emptied it. Also, as there was unemptied trash in the dock of my computer's hard drive, I typed the word "trash" in Spotlight which revealed, among other things, a folder in Users called .trash. Sure enough, when I double clicked on the folder, my trash from the original start-up disk was there, full of all sorts of things. So I dragged the contents to the trash bin of the backup drive, emptied it, then selected the original drive as the startup disk and restarted.
Alas, everything was back to normal. Hard drive icon, desktop stuff, and no spinning beach ball. Hope this helps.