I ask questions like this a lot, and that is not at all what it's about. The motivation for asking what somebody is trying to do is that I don't know a good answer to the question they asked, but I have a nagging feeling that their question might actually be reducible to a different question that I can answer easily. It would be presumptuous to just answer a completely different question, though, so I ask for clarification whether this is in fact the context that it looks like. To put it another way, they're asking "How do I hit glass with stone without breaking it?" but what they actually want to know is "How do I get the lid off a beer bottle?" The fact that they currently believe removing a beer lid involves striking the bottle with a rock doesn't necessarily mean that answers along those lines are the most helpful. But I can't be sure when I see that question whether they are thinking about a beer bottle.

For example, yesterday a guy asked a rather complicated question about hacking the Objective-C runtime to replace a class in the inheritance tree. But from his question, I was able to infer that what he actually wanted to do was globally change a class's behavior. So I answered the question that I read between the lines. His response was, "Oh, yeah, I don't know why I didn't do that to begin with." In that case I felt sure enough to answer without asking, but in other cases I'm not as confident whether this is actually a different question in disguise.