Force quit Finder - now Finder won't restart!

Question

Hi there,
Last night I was converting a bunch of video files in Quicktime and copying them to a samba server on the LAN (so I could play them on my Linux-based media machine) when the Finder stopped responding and I got the spinning beachball of death.
The beachball appeared when I clicked on one of the files in Finder and it tried to generate a preview in column-view. The media files were fairly big ones (1 gig) and .mkv format (which seem particularly processor-intensive to decode) and I'm pretty sure the file in question was on the Samba server.
So all in all everything seemed to be against the Finder creating this preview and I figured it was going to take a long time to do so, so I'd just force-relaunch the Finder and go back and open the folder in a different view in order to copy it wherever it needed to be.
After doing so, though, Finder fails to restart - I've got no icons on my desktop and I can't navigate to a folder of files to click on the one I want to view.
Often in the past when I've experienced this, typing `open /path/to/folder` in terminal has had the effect of forcing Finder to restart, however on this occasion I get this error message "2008-05-23 18:11:07.383 open[7567] LSOpenFromURLSpec() returned -600 for application (null) urls file://localhost/Applications/."
If I look for the process using `ps` I see the process name in brackets:
$ ps -wwwwwx | grep Finder
5958 ?? E 0:00.00 (Finder)
$
Apparently the "E" in the above line indicates that the process is trying to exit. I can't get any further using `kill -9 5958` or anything else I've tried so far.
The Finder icon is still showing in the Dock and if I right-click on it I see "Application not responding" (greyed out), "Hide" and "Relaunch". Choosing "Relaunch" has no effect. Finder does not seem to appear in Activity Monitor (showing "All Processes") . If I open the "Force Quit Applications" dialogue again the Finder is still shown and highlighting it changes the button from "Force Quit" to "Relaunch", but clicking that has no effect (except that Finder disappears from the lit of programs; it reappears if I close the "Force Quit" window and reopen it from the Apple menu).
*+Obviously I could sort this by rebooting my computer, but I really don't want to do that right now.+* Can anyone suggest a way of properly killing this process so that Finder can restart?
Many thanks in advance for any suggestions,
Stroller.

Answer 1

BDAqua wrote:
Sometimes after Force quitting it a few times, it'll work... about 5% of the time.
Thanks - I'll give that a few more goes. Not that I haven't already!!
Might try to open Activity Monitor to see what else is hung, my guess is System UIServer or Window Server.
How would they show as hung?
WindowServer shows 1% - 2% activity, and the real & virtual memory values are updated every second or so, so I assume that's fine.
I was about to say that SystemUIServer does indeed show no activity, but it just blipped up to 0.2%.
I'm not familiar with SystemUIServer, but if I recall correctly killing or restarting WindowServer will close all my active windows, which is exactly what I'd like to avoid (I might as well reboot the machine as do that).
$ ps -wwwwwvvxa | grep -e WindowServer -e SystemUI
61 Ss 87:59.46 0 664 0 474840 107808 - 0 1.8 -5.1 /System/Library/Frameworks/ApplicationServices.framework/Frameworks/CoreGraphic s.framework/Resources/WindowServer -daemon
177 S 0:46.88 0 652 0 253740 11164 - 0 0.0 -0.5 /System/Library/CoreServices/SystemUIServer.app/Contents/MacOS/SystemUIServer -psn0655361
8520 R+ 0:00.00 0 488 0 27812 276 - 0 0.0 -0.0 grep -e WindowServer -e SystemUI
~ $
Furthermore, I think your HD/OS needs some maintenance.
I wouldn't debate that - I installed OS 10.4 on this machine when 10.4 was released, IIRC, so it's well overdue for a reinstall. I want to upgrade this system to 10.5, but have a load of procrastinating to do first.
But I would debate your evidence for saying it - doesn't everyone have a hung Finder occasionally? I don't think I've ever had a Mac which I didn't sometimes have to reboot. I would guess I've had pretty much this problem half a dozen times since this G5 was new - I reboot it and everything works fine and I forget about it. No worries. But right now that's not terribly convenient.
Typically I sleep my Macs when not in use, and `uptime` typically shows a month or two. But I do believe that Macs are prone to "inexplicable grouchiness" in this condition.
Stroller.