I thought I would let the list know that my expert MAC friend has gotten my system back in running order (at least for now). My friend came over and these are the steps he did to "fix" the problem. 1. Created New User with the same privileges as I have. 2. Logged in as a new user no problem. 3. He deleted the PLIST datasets for the FINDER (and a few other). 4. Logged out and I logged in. 5. Problem disappeared . We had run TT4 and disk warrior (with lots of side issues of versioning problems) neither spotted the problem PLISTs. Back and running no need to archive and re-install. Rather simple. The trick was (IMO) to figure out the PLIST for the finder was corrupt (never mind that neither disk utility pointed at any issues whatsoever). Of course the bigger issue is how it became corrupted in the first place. Ed