Mac OS X 10.4.11 randomly closing windows

[Reigner]

My grandmother's PowerBook G4 was recently reported by my father to have been randomly closing windows for no apparent reason. I have no additional information on this, as I'm still at home.

Anyone else experienced this?

[Turboladdade]

I have not, however I'd suggest looking first at the keyboard - perhaps the Command key is sticky whenever "W" is pressed, a window closes?

Also check to make sure that he isn't confusing a more serious problem like programs quitting unexpectedly with "windows closing."

[bike4fun]

My Powerbook just started this problem also. I also have Mac OS X 10.4.11. Hopefully someone knows the answer.

[Turboladdade]

My Powerbook just started this problem also. I also have Mac OS X 10.4.11. Hopefully someone knows the answer.

Can you give more detail on exactly what is happening? What kind of windows? Finder windows? Open document windows? When does this occur? Can you reliably repeat it or is it totally random?

[Reigner]

Finally got to my grandmother's computer. From what I've seen, the Finder is restarting itself every one to five minutes. When I'm looking at Activity Monitor, a process called "crashdump" appears and disappears when Finder Restarts.

Bug? Malicious Script? Apple being a real jerk about upgrading? Help!

[Turboladdade]

Crashdump is simply the Mac OS creating a log of what is happening when the a program crashes. This is the source of those error reports you sometimes have the option of sending to Apple.

I would say something is bothering the bejesus out of Finder. First, try going to your grandmother's home folder, inside of which navigate to Library / Preferences, and find the file named com.apple.finder.plist and delet it. Then, log out and log back in again (or just restart the computer). See if that fixes things.

if not, also try repairing permissions in Disk Utility. Do both of these things, and get back to us with a status update.

[grezyvz]

my PPC G5 does the same thing. I tried the above and didn't work.
"I would say something is bothering the bejesus out of Finder. First, try going to your grandmother's home folder, inside of which navigate to Library / Preferences, and find the file named com.apple.finder.plist and delet it. Then, log out and log back in again (or just restart the computer). See if that fixes things."
It also opens a window as well. So not the stuck key. It happened right after an update for quicktime 7.6.Not sure if that has anything to do with it. I'm on OSX 10.4.11

[grezyvz]

Found something that worked on mactalk.com
Go to preferences and find Stuffit AVR - disable this.

[Turboladdade]

I would recommend making sure you have the latest version of Stuffit installed. I've always fond Stuffit's support, especially in Mac OS X to be really unreliable. Is this problem (and fix) happening to you while you're using the latest version of Stuffit?

[SupermanofFL]

Found something that worked on mactalk.com
Go to preferences and find Stuffit AVR - disable this.

That was the fix. Thanks would never have found it. Mac G4 10.4.11