Finder misbehavoir launched from Dock

[dbhill]

Normally clicking the Dock Finder icon, a finder window appears. Suddenly clicking the Finder icon does nothing. CMD-N gets a new window, but why the change and how to get it to work correctly? I could not find a preference that is relevant in Finder Preferences. I deleted the Finder Prefs, but to no avail.
Any thoughts?

~Dennis

[Phil St. Romain]

Do you have a Finder window open and minimized, perhaps? That would explain it.

Otherwise, I haven't a clue. You might try quitting the Finder (I think you can do so from Force-Quit) and seeing if the problem persists when it starts up again.

Phil

[mervTormel]

yeah, even with a minimized-to-dock finder window, clicking the finder-in-dock creates a new window on my rig.

try robg's trick for establishing consistent windows.

open a new window, but don't select anything in it. grow/shrink to your preferred size, maybe adjust a column width, then _close_ the window.

see if that joggles the finder into resetting it's headspace.

[dbhill]

This is an exasperating perplexity. Closed all apps, Force-Quit Finder, relaunched, opened, reset, closed, clicked... nada. I thought I had this OS figured out, but this has me baffled. Of course there is a solution, I just don't know what it is. Please, somebody?

~Dennis

[mervTormel]

hmmm, any third party gui enhancers installed? if so, what happens if they're disabled?

--
"Get mean at them eggs, Luke!" -Dragline

[dbhill]

I try to keep my machine really clean; the only shareware utilities I have are MouseZoom, XRay and TinkerTool. Finder windows worked normally before and after installing these. I could reinstall the system, but I'm really curious to find out what is going on. I support lots of other systems and would like to know what to do if I ever see this again. So I'm open to try anything. I checked top in Terminal for stalled processes; everything is good. So thank you for sharing this mystery.

~Dennis

[mervTormel]

okay, seems that those particular installs are benign. i, also, would rather you not reinstall, and find the culprit/solution.

it's most likely a prefs problem, and there's this pref file...

% ll ~/library/preferences/.GlobalPreferences.plist
-rw------- 1 merv staff 4.1k Feb 8 18:57 prefs/.GlobalPreferences.plist

it holds a lot of creamy goodness, so after gandering at it, if you blast it, then what, besides having to redefine a lot of prefs?

i wonder how prefs work. if it isn't found in ~/library/preferences/*, does it fill in holes with /library/preferences/* ? consider that and look in /lib...

[dbhill]

Since I had trashed the ~FinderPrefs with no benefit, your suggestion to look at /Library gave me an idea. I logged in a root and determined that Finder windows worked as expected. Then I logged in again as user, and voila... the Finder window behavoir had mysteriously been healed by going to root and back. Ain't that somethin'? Thank you Merv for perservering through this strangeness.

~Dennis

[dbhill]

For the curious; there was an open window, but it was invisible. Last week I docked the Favorites folder with 'keep in dock'. Couple of days later I pulled the folder off the Dock to poof it in a billow of non-local spacetime. At the mouse-up on the desktop the GUI went poof, but the application layer opened the folder in an invisible ghost process. Thus I was unable to generate a new finder window from the Dock Finder icon. Going to root and opening Finder from the Dock awakened the Favorites folder in the GUI; which was waiting for me back in the user domain. Closing the folder window resolved everything. This is why deleting preferences had no effect. Interesting.

~Dennis