Finder Crashes When Control-Clicking

Over the weekend, I encountered a Mac running Mac OS X 10.3.9 that was having the problem of the Finder relaunching every time the user right-clicked (or control-clicked) an item on the desktop or in a Finder window. Of course, control-clicking an item in the Finder brings up a contextual menu, so I immediately suspected it was a problem with a contextual menu item installed in /Library/Contextual Menu Items or in ~/Library/Contextual Menu Items.

A quick look at the user's crashreporter logs in Console showed me that the Finder was crashing when trying to access "StuffitCM", a contextual menu installed with Allume Stuffit Deluxe.

I didn't spend a huge amount of time isolating the specific conflict, but uninstalling the Stuffit CM by dragging it out of the /Library/Contextual Menu Items/ folder and relogging back in fixed this user's problem. The user had also installed Unsanity's Applicataion Enhancer (APE) along with LabelsX and I uninstalled that as well. It may very well have been a conflict between the two products. As always, your mileage may vary and remember, logfiles are your friends.

This thread at Apple Discussions helped me troubleshoot the issue.