Imac applicationS crashing when navigate to file

[swamphox]

imac OSX 10.6.8 i5 16gb ram. Whenever I need to navigate to a folder to either save something or attach something, the application that I am using to navigate to the location, it crashes. Without fail... every time. Example with photoshop. I want to batch process a bunch of images to send them. Just process. I use the dialogs with PS to locate the files I need to process. When I get to the point of choosing the location from which to pull or point to the files PS crashes...every time without fail. If I need to attach a file using gmail and I use the attach file dialog from gmail. As soon as the I navigate to the folder...CRASH. If I drag files into photoshop or gmail, no problem. I could live with this if I could drag and drop for every application but some application just won't allow for drag and drop. This happened before on this same machine, I upgraded to Lion and the problem persisted. I recently had a drive fail so I had to reinstall. After 6 months of smooth operation this problem comes back.

 

[chscag]

It's possible your hard drive has bad sectors or may be failing. Boot to your Recovery partition (Command + R on boot up) and verify the hard drive from Disk Utility. Upgrading the OS is not an answer to underlying problems since chances are they'll just carry over to the new OS.

 

[swamphox]

This is a new hard drive. It does matter where the files are. They could be on a network drive. The applications that I use that cause this problem the most are photoshop and google chrome/gmail. The application crashes before the files are chosen so the application does not yet no where they are coming from. Tested the hard btw...no bad sectors.