Snow Leopard: Save as... dialogue sheepish; Slow to appear

Some users have been reporting that the Save and Save as... dialogue windows have been extremely slow to appear, in some cases over a minute and often resulting in the spinning beach ball. This issue seems to span across multiple applications, including TextEdit, Word, Excel, and other Mac OS X programs.

Apple Support Discussions user "DemoRay" reports:

I've been having this very same problem - the Save dialog takes an unusual amount of time to come up. I've been getting the dreaded spinning beach-ball every time I go to save any type of file. It started three days ago and I can't track down the source of the delay.

Thanks for the LaunchServices suggestion. I did try rebuilding LaunchServices via Terminal but it seems that was not the issue in my case, as there was no change in the delay.

It's not that it's waiting for a drive to spin up. The Save dialog is slow all the time, even with no external drives attached, and even if I'd just saved the file five seconds earlier.

To try rebuilding LaunchServices (which has offered temporary relief to some users):

1. Open Terminal.
2. In the Terminal window, type:

   /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Versions/A/Support/lsregister -kill -r -domain local -domain system -domain user

3. Press Enter. Quit Terminal and restart your Mac after the command runs.

Other users report that the restarting of their Mac alone temporarily resolves the issue. Another suggestion is to use a third party maintenance application, such as Onyx, to clear user caches. For more on Mac maintenance, read this.

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