Finder Hanging?

[brahma]

Hi All.

On occasion I login to a Mac on my network, and it doesn't load the user shell. I just get the background with, apparently, no Finder. Dock isn't loaded either. I have to turn the Mac off and on again - if I log in with a different user, it often works - but not always.

Not sure, but I think it is always the Admin account that hangs.

I'm running Leopard clients on a Tiger OS X. Mac client is also bound to AD

Any ideas?

[brahma]

Nobody got any ideas for me? Happened on two MAcs today ....

[mitcheln]

Nobody got any ideas for me? Happened on two MAcs today ....

I used the following to help me figure out why the finder was taking ages to become responsive on log in. Maybe it will help you:
Create a new user (you may be stuck at this point if you can't access an admin account)
Log in as new user
run terminal
run command: top -l 120 -n 5 -o cpu > top.txt
Switch user to one that exhibits the problem
Wait for aproximately 2 minutes before switching off
Restart the machine and login as the new user
Look at top.txt and see if it has identified a process that is hogging the processor
Hope that provides some clues
All the best.

[iSteve]

We've had this a few times and it's been to do with corrupt fonts (if my memory serves me correctly). We used Font Fiangler/Fangler (?) to sort things out. This was back in the day of 10.4.3 though.