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I've been having this issue with my old and new MBP. It must be linked to an application but I can't for the life of me figure out what. I'd initially thought Adobe CC but appears not.

I can't make a definite link to what crashed the process but it appears to be something relating to opening new windows or apps. It'll crash simply by opening a new Finder window, although not always. It's not consistent at all but very frequent.

I've spent hours speaking with Apple support but had no joy.

Here's a diagnostics report from recent crash. If anyone can shed any light on this I'd be forever in your debt.

I've had to post the report externally due to the character limit here:

https://pastebin.com/yH6zgTdc

Kelvin Farrell
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    Welcome to StackExchange. normalizerd is part of the PSNormalizer Framework, with the "PS" standing for PostScript. AFAIK, it is invoked when a conversion from Postscript to PDF occurs. Unfortunately, on macOS, this can occur in many places/with many tasks (in Preview.app, when printing etc.) = many possible entry vectors for this issue. Can you check if there are documents in your printer queue? Can you check its (normaliserd's) RAM usage in Activity Monitor.app? – Gummibando May 18 '20 at 15:22
  • Hey @Gummibando. Thanks for the reply.

    I had a look and nothing is in the printer queue. One of the steps Apple support did was to get me to remove all printers, but the issue persisted. Also, I've had this issue across two devices now (I used Migration Tool to transfer Documents folder) so my fear is that it's conflicting with something or that I've copied over a damaged file in some way?

    I also had a look just now at Activity Monitor and there's 5.5mb usage on RAM.

     – Kelvin Farrell May 18 '20 at 22:11
  • Thanks. So, not memory hogging, no rogue CUPS printer queue. Are there any messages in Console.app when a crash is happening? – Gummibando May 19 '20 at 11:08
  • @Gummibando Nothing that stands out to me. The PasteBin link I shared in the original post is a good example of the message I get. It's very... nondescript.

    I'm at the end of my tether with this. I've reset the printing system this morning to double check that, but still having the same issue.

    Getting an increase in the number of crashes now too. Adobe Spaces Helper was one, but I uninstalled Adobe CC yesterday to try and go a day without it to see if that solved it. It didn't.

     – Kelvin Farrell May 19 '20 at 11:19
  • Yep, this is a nasty one :/ Can you try resetting/rebuilding the XPC and dyld caches? Terminal : "sudo /usr/libexec/xpchelper --rebuild-cache" and "sudo update_dyld_shared_cache -root / -force"? (reboot afterwards). You can also use a tool like Onyx if you don't want to use the command line (it's free). – Gummibando May 19 '20 at 11:54
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    You could also try to create an additional (new) user to the system and see if the problem is specific to your user account or "global". – Gummibando May 19 '20 at 12:02
  • Any news/changes/improvements? – Gummibando May 20 '20 at 15:50
  • Apologies @Gummibando for not coming back sooner. I ran those terminal scripts. The first wouldn't work because it said there wasn't the file at that location. The other unfortunately didn't solve the issue. – Kelvin Farrell May 21 '20 at 12:17
  • I will try the new account and see how that fairs. I do believe I tried this when it first started happening and the issue wasn't happening outside of my profile. The fact that is was happening on my old MBP and now this, my thinking could be that I dragged across something corrupt in Documents via Migration Tool. – Kelvin Farrell May 21 '20 at 12:18
  • @Gummibando I set up a new user account and used it for about an hour and had no issues. I even used Adobe CC which often seems to trigger the issue. Can not replicate it.

    So, is there a way of effectively resetting my user account files without losing data? Or, an alternative approach?

     – Kelvin Farrell May 24 '20 at 22:34

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I had this problem too. For me it was caused by a 'bad' eps file that the Finder kept trying to render a preview of - in open windows or 'Open' dialogs etc.

finaldiner
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  • From what I understand, you have already found a solution to the problem, it might be worth it to include it here. You only state the reason *why* it is happening, try to also include *how* solve it. – Thinkr May 11 '23 at 20:05
  • Sorry, I thought my ‘solution’ was obvious: I deleted the ‘bad’ eps file. – finaldiner May 12 '23 at 21:23