Finder not working on a non-English Mac
By Kim Gammelgaard on Sunday, August 4 2013, 11:00 - Permalink
During the summer, I had the pleasure to troubleshoot a Mac running Mac OS X 10.8.4 using Danish as the login language. On it, the Finder would persistently not open. Everything else was working fine, including accessing the file menu from all other apps.
We tried the usual steps: running Yasu from Jimmitchell.org i.e. cleaning caches, running permission reset and other easy maintenance, deleting the preference files and restarting Finder and the computer:
rm ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.finder.plist
rm ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.sidebarlists.plist
Nothing seemed to work. Then I found a mention in the log files about a missing seemingly unrelated file and got an idea: what if we change language to English.
This turned out to work. The Finder works flawlessly with English, but does not start using Danish.
The user must have tried to optimize the Mac and had been using one or the other language clean-up tools that deletes all languages from the computer, which means that Danish should no longer be present, but somehow the clean up procedure had been faulty and even though the file had been deleted, the entry of Danish had not been removed from the list of available languages, Consequently, it was halting at startup of the Finder as it was trying to access the Danish da.lproj-file that was missing. As English worked and as the user was happy with that until the next Finder update comes along, and as we both were busy, we left it with that.