MacOS – Finder window opens scrolled down

external-diskfindermacosscrolling

Nothing serious but a bit irritating 🙂

A removable USB storage, formatted as FAT32 (actually this is an Android tablet but it doesn't seem to matter), is used on several Macs, all running the same OS (Mavericks) at the same patch level.

On one of the Macs, and only that one, when the media is inserted and the FS mounted, the first opened window (the top of the file hierearchy), displayed as a list, start to be displayed wedged at the bottom of the list (as if the window has been fully scrolled down). On all the other Macs it opens wedged at the top.

Other removable medias don't exhibit that behaviour on the "different" Mac (they start listed from the begin, at the top, the opening window is not scrolled down).

Why? How?
How can we get rid of that?

All this has been ineffective:
– The window has been thoroughly scrolled up before ejecting the media.
– Changing and reverting the order and/or the sorting of the file list in the window before ejecting has no effect, switching to icon or column view and reverting is no more successful.
– The file hierarchy of the media has been cleaned (._* files, .Trashes/, .fseventsd/, etc. have been wiped).
The Finder Preferences seem to be the same across all the Macs.

Any trick or hint where this may be tweacked, cached, sticked?
On the Media? on "the" Mac? buried in the filesystem or in the preferences?

Thank you for your answers.

Best Answer

On the Mac showing the problem

  • edit com.apple.finder.plist in ~/Library/Preferences
  • set to 0 or remove scrollPositionY (and scroolPositionX) for the list view
  • save that preference file
  • restart the finder (option click in the dock).