[OMGWTFBBQ]

I have had this problem a few times now and I am at a loss as to what to do to 1) resolve it, and 2) prevent it from happening again.

The end problem is that my Finder CPU usage goes to 100% and it slowly grabs memory over time. It will do this forever until the machine is rebooted. You can quit any program that is currently running and it won't have any impact at all.
That has every indication of an infinite loop in which it is allocating a little bit of memory each time and therefore slowly eating it up.

Also, early in this process the OS menu bar at the top will disappear and then come back.

All I do is start iPhoto and then once I quit (regardless of if I have actually done anything in there or not) then the fans start up and CPU usage goes to 100%. When I am actually in iPhoto it doesn't seem to be bothered.
I can then look in Activity Monitor and the CPU is being used 100% by the Finder process (or as close to 100% as it can get). There is also heavy memory usage on "kernel_task", but not CPU usage.
I can quit out of every single program and it won't matter at all.

Then if I start up the Console I can see that it shows one header bit, and then forever loops over the rest, showing the same thing - which is:

PaintCore:Undo:Broken ilImage Chain
Broken ilImage Chain
2004-11-08 16:07:20.974 iPhoto[1133] Using library: /Users/esmith/Pictures/iPhoto Library
userinfo: **warning: unexpected TLV:
userinfo: sn =�?�Ć
userinfo: type =0xbfffec94
userinfo: length=0xbfffec94
userinfo: value:

userinfo: 0xbfffec94 0xbfffec94 0xbfffec94 0xbfffec94 0xbfffec94 0xbfffec94 0xbfffec94 0xbfffec94
userinfo: 0xbfffec94 0xbfffec94 0xbfffec94 0xbfffec94 0xbfffec94 0xbfffec94 0xbfffec94 0xbfffec94
userinfo: **warning: unexpected TLV:
userinfo: sn =�?�Ć
userinfo: type =0xbfffec94
userinfo: length=0xbfffec94
userinfo: value:

I know that I can reboot the machine and this goes away (well, the 100% CPU usage goes away, but then if I open iPhoto again it starts this all over again).

Can someone please tell me what has gone wrong and what I can do to fix it - aside from formatting and reinstalling since there is no reason to have to do that with a proper OS. That is the whole reason I switched (happily) to OS X over that of Windows - I was too frequently seeing things like this and having no reasonable way to fix it.

[SMacTech]

Did you export a file to the desktop? Certain jpeg files have been reported to cause this Finder glitch.

Remove any jpeg files from your desktop, if there are any.

[OMGWTFBBQ]

Interesting - I didn't know that. I just got married and have been e-mailing photos around. It is highly probable that I dragged a photo out from the "Organize" view onto the Desktop so that I could e-mail it.

I will go through all of my Desktop files to see if there is something there.

Thank you! I am absolutely thrilled if that is the case!

[SMacTech]

While I have never had this problem, I have seen it reported on several forums, including this one. So you may want to do a search and see what comes up.

[OMGWTFBBQ]

I did a search here on "Broken ilImage Chain" and it returned no hits (as did Google - although Google did suggest that maybe I had mean just "image").

I haven't done a search for "100% CPU and Finder", I'll give that a try - thanks.

[OMGWTFBBQ]

This thread here (
http://forums.macnn.com/showthread.p...+finder+iphoto) looks very similar to the issue I was having.

At this point, I will assume it was due to some image on the Desktop and go from there in the future if it happens again. (open Activity Monitor, double-click on the Finder process to see what files are open, and then find an image that looks to be the problem and delete it, then restart the Finder process)

[Judge_Fire]

On our laptop, this 100% Finder thing drives the CPU temperately uncomfortably high very quickly.

I've added a 'Quit' option to the Finder, using TinkerTool. Any time the Finder freaks out, I quit it. When I eventually relaunch it some time later, it's usually back to normal.

J

[OMGWTFBBQ]

I have not heard of TinkerTool before - thanks, I will give it a look.

[SMacTech]

Or you can control-option-click the Finder dock icon and click relaunch.

[darkhero168]

i know this dates back to 2004, but i was having this issue and was wondering if there is a reason why it's happening? I only had 2 folders a note file and a partially completed mp3 file on my desktop when this occured but it has happened once before (don't remember what was on the desktop at the time)

i don't mind quitting finder to get it to stop, but i would like to know why it's happening too

[darkhero168]

i just found out what activated this issue.. i have a folder with pictures on my desktop.. i had opened it and once i closed it CPU usage skyrocketted.. i tried to delete the folder but it says the images are in use.. i didn't open or look at any of the images in the folder so i have no idea why they would be in use :s