How can I kill Finder if it's not responding? I have some Finder windows that I just cannot close. They are completely unresponsive, and have the rainbow wheel whenever I select any of them.

Force Quit / Relaunch doesn't help, because the windows just get reopened again and they continue to be unresponsive. They also don't respond to e.g. Command + Option + W.

Other applications are fine, it's just Finder that's stuck.

Is there a way I can force quit Finder without reopening all the windows?
Answer found here.

Open a terminal, and move the saved settings from Finder into a backup folder just in case:

mv ~/L*/S*/*finder.savedState Desktop


Then, you can Force Quit Finder as usual using Command + Option + Esc, or use this handy terminal command:

killall Finder


Then, assuming everything looks good, you can delete the finder.savedState folder which has appeared on your desktop.