The file "com.apple.Finder 14-06-19.plist" appears to be detritus left over from an earlier attempt to reset Finder's preferences. Instead of moving "com.apple.Finder.plist" to the trash, you renamed it by inserting a date in its name.
It's a totally irrelevant file. You can delete it with either
defaults delete "com.apple.Finder 14-06-19"
or
rm ~/Library/Preferences/"com.apple.Finder 14-06-19.plist"
In both cases, notice that the name contains spaces, and so must be quoted.
None of this explains why Finder won't start. I suspect you've done something to the application itself.
The Finder application lives (or is supposed to live) at /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app. As a first step, check that it's there and has reasonable permissions with:
ls -lOde /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app
What you should see on OS X 10.6.8 Snow Leopard is:
drwxr-xr-x 3 root wheel - 102 Apr 21 2011 /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app
Another thing to check is that you haven't somehow put another com.apple.Finder.plist in /Library/Preferences. In response to:
ls /Library/Preferences/com.apple.Finder.plist
you should get:
ls: /Library/Preferences/com.apple.Finder.plist: No such file or directory
As for the trash icon still showing something in it even though ls ~/.Trash says the folder is empty, there are two possible explanations:
First, there may be some invisible files in ~/.Trash. Add a -a flag to show all files, as in:
ls -a ~/.Trash
Ignore entries for ".", "..", and ".DS_Store". The first two are unixisms; they appear to appear in every directory, but do not correspond to actual items. The last one, .DS_Store, is crated as needed by Finder, and will be explicitly ignored when checking whether something is empty.
The other possibility is that you have files in the trash that are from other volumes. Since files cannot be moved from one volume to another, but files can be trashed from any volume, there must be a trash folder for each user on each volume. ~/.Trash is the trash folder for things you've deleted from the boot volume, and is the only trash folder we're interested in, but the Trash icon will show that it's full if you have a non-empty trash folder on any volume.
You should look in Console (by launching Console.app in /Applications/Utilities) to see if there are any useful error message around the one that says Finder cannot be launched. There will surely be one specifying why Finder cannot be launched.
Unless you're curious what the actual problem is, it might be time to try re-installing the OS. Get the Combo updater for OS X 10.6.8 and re-apply it. This won't disturb your user files, and may correct whatever is wrong with Finder. (It won't hurt to back up everything first. For that matter, it wouldn't hurt to have a backup, period.)
