Hazel blows up my computer!

Ok, maybe not that extreme, but it really messes things up. I had it working great for a long time, mainly for one specific purpose: to take a sharepoint on an OS X server which has around a thousand pictures uploaded to it each day, and sort them into folders by date. I have Hazel running on my computer, and I periodically mount the sharepoint, during which time Hazel would sort the files.

Then the server got rebuilt, and I stupidly mounted the sharepoint with Hazel running without checking things beforehand. Of course, the permissions were set wrong and Hazel couldn't move the files, which caused Growl to freak out and cover my entire screen with notifications. I ended up having to kill the power to my machine because neither Growl nor Hazel would force quit.

Now, Hazel seems perfectly stable until I mount the sharepoint, when it moves about 30 or so pictures and promptly locks up. It also takes the Finder down with it, and relaunching the Finder just kills it instead. After trying that, other programs will start to lock up and beachball until I have to restart. There's about 5000 or so pictures in the folder, which is a lot, but I've successfully had Hazel sort through that many before.

I think the best thing to do to track this down is check the logs. Go to the "Info" tab and click "View Log". This will bring up Hazel's log as well as, possibly, the main console logs. Look for any errors or if you can pick out a particular file that is not being moved, look that file up in particular.

Also, if things are crashing, there should hopefully be some crash logs available. In your Library/Logs/CrashReporter folder, look for logs for Finder and for anything starting with "Hazel" or "hazel".

I suggest emailing me with anything you find. Click on the "Contact Support" link in the "Info" tab. Also, if possible, include an export of your rules so I can see if there's anything about the rules themselves that may be contributing to this.

Thanks.