It's related to the Apple Events bug that was introduced in 10.8.2 or an earlier version of OS X. Itthat also makes revealing files in Finder stop working. There's a bug report about it at TotalFinder's support forum.
As a workaround, you can terminate the appleeventsd process with sudo killall appleeventsd
sudo killall -KILL appleeventsd
. (Without -KILL the process is sent a TERM signal, and I also had the same problemmany processes stop responding as @myhd described.)