Originally Posted By: Artie505
No luck in my test account; no luck with a safe boot; no luck clearing the long date followed by restarting, resetting, and restarting again.

If th problem exists in your test account then it is system related and would not be effected by any preferences, etc. in your user account. The safe boot eliminates most extensions, plugins, LaunchAgents and LaunchDaemons as causal agents.

Originally Posted By: Artie505
I also uninstalled my Finder plugin, XtraFinder, and restarted with no joy.

And I"ve now trashed com.apple.finder.plist, and still no joy.

Those have already been eliminated. I can only think of one more possibility, a top level .DS_Store file. You might try deleting the .DS-Store files and see if that changes your results.

If we knew what it was we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would it?

— Albert Einstein