How many plug-ins do you have? Did you update any plug-ins, install or reinstall NotePerformer?

If you have a lot of plugs, Finale may try to re-verify all of them again and this can take a long time. Reinstalling Finale guarantees that this is happening as does updating NotePerformer.

Start Finale and wait. Only if it crashes do you try again. If after a crash it does not want to restart, reboot your Mac and try again. Once it comes up, you are good. Do not uninstall anything or the process will begin again. Because I have nearly a thousand plug-ins, Finale on my 18-core iMac Pro took well over a half hour and would crash four times every time I updated NotePerformer. On my M2 Studio Ultra, an NP update takes 9 minutes and Finale crashes only once or twice. It was Arne Wallander who helped me figure this out over Finale 26 and I sent our findings to MM Support at that time.

It can also be any corrupted plug-in. If so, the macOS may try up to three times before sandboxing the plug and moving onto the next one. Unlike most DAWs, Finale will not tell you what's going on.

Thanks for your response, Mike. I have few if any plug-ins, and my problem wasn't that Finale kept crashing or that it took a long time to boot up. My problem was that Finale wouldn't boot up at all (or, to be a little more specific, that it always crashed about two seconds into the boot-up process).

The solution I finally hit on was to restore my Mac hard drive from a Time Machine backup I'd made before the problem with Finale arose. This was tedious and time-consuming (especially since I had to reload all the files and folders I'd changed in other apps in the meantime), but it worked.

Sorry this happened. If there is a next time, you have a 24 hour window of opportunity to save your recent work to a flash or external drive then roll the clock back. It takes a minute or so to do this using APFS Snapshots. One cannot roll back the macOS anymore since it is sandboxed in its own Volume but you can roll back the Data Volume. I wrote about this in 2018.

https://www.motunation.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=64689

Miss the 24 hour window and yes, a full Time Machine restore is necessary. I test a lot of apps etc. and APFS Snapshots are my best friend. I always note the time when I start so that I can select the latest Snapshot before I started (whatever) in case I have to restore.

Thanks for the tip, Mike.