Finder slowed down to a crawl

Finder suddenly barely functional. You click on it & nothing happens for 5 minutes. Endless spinning cartwheel when viewing sidebar window. Any help deeply appreciated. Have Maverick 10.9. Third week of using my iMac, first 2 weeks were fine, it was fast, now almost un-usably slow.

This would suggest a hard drive issue. Take it in for servicing, or just try booting from your clone backup if you have one. If you don't, try booting holding down command-r for the recovery partition.

Finder crawling

chas_m said:

This would suggest a hard drive issue. Take it in for servicing, or just try booting from your clone backup if you have one. If you don't, try booting holding down command-r for the recovery partition.

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Thank u so much Chas. tried recovery from time machine did not fix. AppleCare tech guy said he ran disk utility did not see problem only other solution is clean install. Any other ideas gratefully appreciated. Could it be a corrupt file?