Numerous Mac users who have upgraded to the latest Mac OS X release, 10.6 Snow Leopard, have informed us of a problem which causes the trash to freeze upon emptying it, when it is set to be emptied securely. At first, we believed it to be isolated incidents, but reports kept arriving and as soon as yesterday we actually experienced the problem ourselves.
The problem may occur if you have set your trash to empty securely, and there are several items queued for deletion. The trash will simply hang during the process. To get out of it, you can either cancel the process by clicking the icon to the right, or restart finder by going to “Force Quit” in the Apple menu. Some even report that cancel doesn’t always work. If you experience the problem and do not care much if the trash is being emptied securely or not, just go to Finder’s preferences and uncheck the “Empty Trash Securely” and everything should work nicely again.
Enjoy your lunch!
I’m having this trash hang problem a lot and I do not have the Finder set to empty securely. When it does hang, I can never cancel, I’m left with no alternative but to force restart the Mac. I have more or less determined that this happens when my wife’s account is logged in and I’ve switched back to my own. If I’m the only one logged in, there’s no problem. So I guess I can at least avoid the problem from now on but I’d be much happier if Apple would just fix it.
Yeah, agreed.
However, let’s try to fix it ourselves anyway.
What is the “Empty securely” Trash setting in your wife’s account? My guess is that it fails to initialize your account’s setting, after having used your wife’s.
If I am right and your wife’s account is set to “Empty securely”, try to disable it and see what happens.
Hope it works. Otherwise, let’s pray Apple fixes the problem in the upcoming 10.6.2.
Thank you – took me a while to find your comment, and it was exactly what I needed!!