Finder crashes when control (right) clicking items, fix

Crashes in the Mac OS X Finder can occur in the presence of problematic contextual menu items. These can be recently added items, or those that are rendered incompatible by a significant system update, including iterative Mac OS X releases.

MacFixIt reader John Horvatic provides a case example:

"I've got a problem which I haven't been able to solve yet. I have an Intel iMac 20" with 2 gigs of RAM running Mac O S X 10.4.8 Tiger. My finder seems to quit when I right click on any file, folder, or application most of the time. I've tried tossing the finder preference file, Disk utility, DiskWarrior 4, running disk utility through unix in single user mode. None of this seems to get rid of this issue. I've tried re-applying the Mac OS X 10.4.8 combo update too."

In many cases, this issue is caused by the presence of contextual menu items that may have become problematic under Mac OS X 10.4.8.

Check the following folders:

• ~/Library/Contextual Menu Items/
• /Library/Contextual Menu Items/

for recently added third-party items that could be causing the problem. Try temporarily removing all items, then logging out and back in (or restarting) and check for persistence of the freeze. If the problem is gone, add files back one-by-one to determine the culprit.

Feedback? Late-breakers@macfixit.com.

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