G4 Finder keeps rebooting itself every 20 seconds or so, using 10.4.1

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kimmull

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I have something new and very weird going on, and if I didn't know better, I'd think it was a virus. I'm using a Mac G4, and system 10.4.1. For some unknown reason, no matter what I'm doing or what software I'm using, the Finder keeps rebooting itself and then ends up coming to the front, and it pops open a widow that shows my computer, an external drive I use, and the network icon. I've never seen this kind of thing happen before. It's like the computer is possessed. I'm not connected to any server or anything. I tried all the usual maintenance tricks...rebuilt permissions, used Cocktail and Preferential Treatment to fix and check things, then used Diskwarrior to rebuild the directory, and nothing has fixed the problem. It does this about every 10-20 seconds so it's practically impossible to get anything done. Please advise. Thanks, Kim
 
I'm sorry. I am already running 10.4.11. I mistyped in my earlier post. Please explain how safe boot will help my situation. Thanks!
 
Safe boot will not enable non-apple extensions. So if it's something third party kext or other component causing the Finder issues, then safe boot could cause Finder to behave normally. (at least it would narrow down the problem)
Stuffit products seem to cause a lot of problems with Finder recently... do you remember if you updated their products, or if you did any other software updates or installed new software before ths started to happen?
 
Gotcha. I haven't tried zapping the PRAM yet, so I'm going to give that a shot, and if that doesn't work, I'll do the safe boot to see what happens. I haven't installed anything new in over a year, other than the automatic system/apple updates. I do have Stuffit but haven't used it in over a year because the last time I tried to use it, I discovered that the version is too old for my system software. Thanks for your suggestions!
 
If it still keeps crashing... open Console and see what that reports (Applications/Utilities). That should generate something when Finder crashes.
 
Thanks guys. It was Stuffit after all.

I did a Safe Boot and found that I didn't have the problem while in Safe Boot.

So then I removed all things Stuffit (accept for one thing I didn't know about). I still had the issue.

So I did a search for "stuffit" stuff and found the "Stuffit AVR.prefPane." I removed that and the problem was instantly fixed! Yay! Thanks to everyone who helped me with this situation.

You guys rock!
 
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