System, 15” power book G4, 80G drive, 768 ram 10.4.9
Can someone help?
This has only started to happen of late, when I do a right click or a ctrl click on an icon in the finder or on the desktop all of the icons disappear and then reappear on the desk top and the command I was going to do does not work. In the finder the finder just disappears aswell as the desktop icons. The right click works in programs like word,itunes etc. and works when clicking on the dock. Also works when I right click in mail and safari. This seams to have taken place when I downloaded a security up date a few weeks ago!
Any ideas?

Little_yoharn

Sounds like the Finder is re-starting of its own accord.
1st thing I would do is to trash the finder preferences file. Try doing a search for "finder.plist" and trashing that file. Might need to restart after doing so too

I had a nearly identical problem a while back: Right clicking in the Finder would randomly crash the Finder. At first, I thought to delete the Finder's plist which did not help. Then it dawned upon me: bringing up the contextual menu is causing the Finder to crash, The issue is probably due to a contextual menu item I'd installed!

I removed the Stuffit CM plugin from /Library/Contextual\ Menu\ Items and voila, all was good again. Later, I read on a forum or two that this had been happening to quite a few people. I never reinstalled the plugin as I felt I really didn't need it, so I don't know if the issue would have continued to occur...

Anyhow, in short: drag the Finder's plist and also the Dock's to your Desktop and restart both the Finder and Dock. The Dock and Finder have a funny relationship, hence removing the Dock's plist as well. If that doesn't resolve thngs, then look into third party contextual menu items you've installed (f any.)

Note: moving these plists to your Desktop allows you to return them to their home if the problem is not resolved and then you won't lose all your Finder and Dock settings. Both plists reside in ~/Library/Preferences

Dave

I had exactly the same problem recently after installing Stuffit in order to extract an application installation - my conclusion was that Stuffit was stuffed because immediately after doing so my finder would restart regularly when I was right-clicking to delete files! If it wasn't for those darn .sitx files that some still insist on using I wouldn't install Stuffit at all (I also found magic menu annoying) - in the end I removed the Stuffit CM plugin and all of the additional applications apart from Stuffit expander. I really wish everyone would just stick with the bog standard zip and tar/tgz/bz2 compression schemes - it's really unecessary to have such a huge proliferation of compression formats and utilities.

Thanks all,
I removed the Stuffit CM plugin from /Library/Contextual\ Menu\ and all is now good.
little_yoharn