Can I fix things so Archive Utility doesn't hang on all zip files?

I am using Mac OS X 10.8.2. I don't know exactly when it started (might have been after the upgrade to 10.8.2, but not sure), but now, any zip file I try to open starts up 'Archive Utility', but then it just hangs and I have to force quit it. The zip file is never unzipped.

As a workaround, I can go to the command line and use the 'unzip' command, but that is not very convenient.

Can I re-install this application to see if that would help or is this part of the OS and thus cannot really be re-installed separately?

I have run into this a couple times, both in instances where I didn't have time to dig into the cause. A restart will recover from the underlying failure between finder and apple events server so that you can unzip files, but that's not ideal since the underlying condition is likely to be triggered again.

As it has become clear that an OS bug is causing the hang, I keep a copy of the free app The Unarchiver in my Application folder.

It's related to the Apple Events bug in 10.8.2 that also makes revealing files in Finder stop working.

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 many processes stop responding as @myhd described.)