Finger-pointing over Leopard blue screens heats up

Computerworld - The creators of APE on Saturday denied that their application-enhancement framework is responsible for blue-screening Macintoshes being upgraded to Leopard. Apple Inc., however, blamed the software in a support document advising users to delete APE from their machines.

Within hours of Leopard's Friday debut, users began reporting a "blue screen of death" that appeared after running the default Upgrade option. On affected Macs, the blue screen stymied the required restart after the install, locking users out of their computers.

The Installation and Setup forum on Apple's support site was quickly flooded with messages, including one that fingered Unsanity LLC's APE (Application Enhancer), software required to run Mac customizing haxies such as ShapeShifter, as the culprit. A user identified as Chris Mcculloh posted instructions on manually deleting APE using the Unix command line to kick the Mac through the restart.

Others spread Mcculloh's instructions to new threads on the Apple forum, and reports of success poured in. "This fix seemed to work perfectly for me," said a user identified as TuHolmes.

Trouble is, said Unsanity in an e-mail to Computerworld Saturday afternoon, it's all bunk.

"APE has an artificial block implemented so it refuses to load," said Rosyna Keller, a programmer at Unsanity. "It checks the version number and, if it is 10.5, bails. No other code is executed from APE, and at no time are any APE modules loaded." Keller said he had installed Leopard on three different APE-equipped Macs without problems.

"The only possible way APE could even remotely, theoretically be involved is if they are using an over 2-year-old version of APE (1.5.1 or 1.5, May 2005). But if they're on an ICBM [Intel chip-based Mac], this is not a possibility as we never released an APE that was compatible with the ICBMs that did not have the system version check."

Unsanity added a caution to a standing compatibility note on the home page of its Web site Saturday: "Please make sure you have Application Enhancer 2.0.3 or later installed before you upgrade to Mac OS X 10.5." The company also sent e-mail to members of its mailing list that contained the same advice.

Apple, however, appeared to have decided that APE was the cause of some, if not all, of the blue screens. In a document added to its support database late Friday, the company said "third-party 'enhancement' software" may be the cause, then listed as one of two possible solutions deleting the same four APE files as Mcculloh had highlighted earlier.

Keller said Apple got it wrong, too. "In this case, it's the deletion of Library/Preferences/com.unsanity.ape.plist [one of the four files marked by Mcculloh and Apple for deletion] that shows that no one has actually bothered to troubleshoot this issue," he said. "This file does nothing. It only exists to tell APE to disable itself if you open the APE prefpane and click 'Temporarily Disable.'