How do I fix a corrupt Finder?

Question

Hi,
I am having problems with Finder in Yosemite 10.10.3. Here's what's happening:
1) When I go to open a folder (e.g. "applications") through finder, the finder window is blank (as if the folder were empty), when it clearly isn't. This does not happen just with "applications", it's with any folder on my mac.
2) Whenever this happens, I also notice that if I attempt to delete a file off my desktop (or anywhere in finder), there is a very long delay (several minutes) before the file is deleted (if it deletes at all).
What I've tried:
a) the quick fix is going to "force quit" and relaunching finder. This temporarily solves both of the above problems, but they immediately reoccur within a minute or two after having done this.
b) I've also tried going in to: ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.finder.plist and deleting the .plist file. That seems to solve the problem for a day or two, but eventually I'm back to where I started.  Interestingly, a couple times when I've gone in to ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.finder.plist  to delete that, I've found more than one finder.plist file there - (sometimes there are 2 or 3) - but - they always vanish within a second or two, once I'm in the preferences folder, before I can manually delete them. weird.
c) I've run disk utility and repaired permissions, as well as DiskWarrior, tried restarting, etc.
The problem with the delay in deleting stuff is instantly fixed when I try either of the two fixes above ("a" or "b") so it seems to be related to the finder problem, and both occur at the same time. I also find I can't empty trash when these problems arise, or at least that it takes several minutes to do so, even if the files in trash are only 2 or 3 small files. Again, this is fixed (temporarily) buy both solutions, either "a" or "b" above.
*** I DO NOT want to have to reinstall OS X  as I view that as the "nuclear" option, and this should be fixable without having to resort to that. Yes, I have backups, but this problem exists on all.
Would love to get some suggestions on how I can fix this. What do you guy's think? ... it's the only problem I'm having on my Mac, and it's more than a little frustrating.

Answer 1

Launch the Console application in any of the following ways:
☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)
☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.
☞ Open LaunchPad and start typing the name.
The title of the Console window should be All Messages. If it isn't, select
          SYSTEM LOG QUERIES ▹ All Messages
from the log list on the left. If you don't see that list, select
          View ▹ Show Log List
from the menu bar at the top of the screen.
Click the Clear Display icon in the toolbar. Then take an action that isn't working the way you expect. Select any lines that appear in the Console window. Copy them to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C. Paste into a reply to this message by pressing command-V.
The log contains a vast amount of information, almost all of which is irrelevant to solving any particular problem. When posting a log extract, be selective. A few dozen lines are almost always more than enough.
Please don't indiscriminately dump thousands of lines from the log into this discussion.
Please don't post screenshots of log messages—post the text.
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