Yesterday there was a significant increase in connection times when OS X users when to manually connect to a AFP server via “Connect to Server” in the Finder.  The issue resides in to keys in the users .GlobalPreferences file, iToolsMemberDomain and iToolsMember.  These keys provided the settings for Apple’s iDisk.

For those unfamiliar with iTools it was Apple’s original service that morphed into .Mac, which in return turned into MobileMe and now iCloud.  Apple has been transitioning users off of MobileMe for the last several months and has just started to shutdown their servers.

For some reason when connecting to a server through the “Connect to Server” dialog the system is doing a lookup on the iDisk servers and the delay is caused by the connection timing out.

The solution to this is deleting the two offending keys from the Global preferences using the following commands in terminal.

1.  Backup the Global preferences:

cp ~/Library/Preferences/.GlobalPreferences.plist ~/Library/Preferences/.GlobalPreferences.plist.bak

2. Remove the keys

defaults delete -g iToolsMember

defaults delete -g iToolsMemberDomain

After that AFP connections should return to normal.  There is no need to even restart.

Hope that helps!