By Dan Goodin
Published Saturday 27th October 2007 05:03 GMT

Apple support drones are getting an earful from Mac users who are getting the dreaded Blue Screen of Death while trying to update to the latest and greatest version of OS X. This thread on an official Apple support forum has more than 200 posts left in 25 hours at time of writing. A large percentage of the writers report getting a persistent blue screen that forces them to abort their installation of Leopard.

Among the signs that something is awry is the following post from a Mac user in Australia:

I've just been on the phone to Apple AU support for an hour (around half of that spent on hold, but on-and-off as they sometimes consulted other techs), and they definitely know of the BSOD issue, said they started taking calls from 9am Friday as the first (early courier!) deliveries of Leopard were installed, and they've been flat out, "phones ringing non-stop" since then. Implied that Apple stateside has been swamped (as you can imagine) and they haven't been able to pinpoint the issue causing the BSOD but "they're looking into it".

It's still not clear what's causing the snafu. Seems at least some of the the people experiencing problems had a third-party developer app called Application Enhancer installed. Some also had external disks or other peripherals attached when they pulled the trigger on the Leopard install. The OS went on sale on Friday all over the world. Many users later reported they were able to successfully install, but it sure was a messy road to redemption.

The Register
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This has made my day

Steve Jobs: "La la la la... I can't hear you... la la la... a Mac never crashes... la la la..."

Proof that Macs do crash. I'd compare that to when I was installing beta versions of Vista - never one BSOD.

gries818 wrote:

I'd compare that to when I was installing beta versions of Vista - never one BSOD.

I have to agree, and MS had way more hardware to deal with!

I'm not a Mac fan at all(in fact you can call me a mac hater) but this isn't really Apples fault, but the fault of a badly programmed third party application call "Application Enhancer" by Unsanity. This was part of Microsoft's dilemma, whether to access to the vista kernel which may allow third party applications good or bad to damage the OS. Microsoft also gets its fair share of criticisms for the vulnerability third party applications, and I think it's not fair to blame Apple or Microsoft for something like this.

For those who have this issue a relatively simple fix is posted here

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1195031&tstart=0

1. Reboot into single-user mode (hold Cmd-S while booting machine)
2. Follow the directions OSX gives you when you get to the prompt (I think these were them - just type the two commands it tells you to):
fsck -fy /
3. Remove the following files:
rm -rf /Library/Preference Panes/Application Enhancer.prefpane
rm -rf /Library/Frameworks/Application Enhancer.framework
rm -rf /System/Library/SystemConfiguration/Application Enhancer.bundle
rm -rf /Library/Preferences/com.unsanity.ape.plist
4. Exit, to continue booting normally
exit

OsirisX wrote:

I'm not a Mac fan at all(in fact you can call me a mac hater) but this isn't really Apples fault, but the fault of a badly programmed third party application call "Application Enhancer" by Unsanity.

According to a Cnet podcast, "Buzz Out Loud", there are people claiming to have this issue without having the specific application you mentioned.

The application by Unsanity is only one example of a third party application that does not check for OS version before starting, therefore causing the startup since it is not compatible with the OS and will stall at startup.

augie wrote:

gries818 wrote: I'd compare that to when I was installing beta versions of Vista - never one BSOD. I have to agree, and MS had way more hardware to deal with!

Yeah, well Apple couldn't have possibly guessed that the app would interfere - unless they ran as sophisticated of a Beta program as Microsoft.

Remember how whole websites/threads were devoted to apps that didn't and did work? PRO had one (I used to maintain it when I was a mod here).