Getting Leopard's BSOD? Try uninstalling APE.
By Conrad Quilty-Harper 
posted Oct 28th 2007 7:32PM
posted Oct 28th 2007 7:32PM
While there's no easy way to account for everybody Leopard user's crashing, Unsanity's Application Enhancer is apparently the cause of many a BSOD turning up on a range of user's systems during a system update to Mac OS X 10.5. If, after selecting "update," you're getting a perpetual blue screen, follow Apple's instructions for booting into single-user mode to remove the offending software. If you haven't updated yet, make sure you get rid of the software before you do: alternatively, do a fresh install and it'll overwrite any of the conflicts you would encounter otherwise. And remember to backup, backup, and backup.[Thanks, Dilan J.]
is that what they look like bsod???
Nnnno.
It just works?
Yes, it just [barely] works.
why do I feel next week they'll be an article on vista and all you'll hear from mac fanboys (read, not everyone, just the freaks) that macs don't do crash and vista/xp/etc is stupid and blue screens and yadda yadda.
really.. my xp install hasn't blue screened for years. but whatever. we all have selective hearing I guess.
good luck to all those affected who aren't fanboys.
Yes it does. As long as you don't install apps that dick around with the OS at a very low level. APE is one of those apps and should NOT be installed this soon after an OS launch. People are retards for doing this. Leopard has had numerous changes from build to build over the last few months and THIS is the exact reason Apple should have released the gold master weeks ago. This is on Apple's fucking head just as much as its on the end user's for installing the software.
Every article where a Mac has a problem, I see this comment dragged out for another round. Please, can we just let go?
@ John Doe:
Uhm.. as long as you don't install apps? So the 6 useful apps for mac that you CAN do something with should not be used? Isn't that what you mac fan boys always make fun of US for as well? "Yeah, you guys have tons of software.. tons of CRAP software". But then it happens to YOU guys and the first thing you blame is the same thing that you just finished joking US for?
You guys really need to assemble so that you can get your insults correct... and not just to jerk each other off and compare .png dock icons.
Now now John Doe... Take it easy!
One of my favorite apps running on OS X is APE. I have been using it for 2 or 3 version and I love it! It lets me and other people do what Apple wont let us do. What do you think we suppose to do with our new 10.5 OS, only install Apple apps?
Besides, I wonder if your statement also applies to the iPhone?
Or do it as an Archive & Install.
I encountered the "blue screen of sadness" after doing a standard upgrade. A "Archive & Install" fixed it. I've never heard of APE, so I don't know if it was on my system or not.
What was that? Oh, Apple software being unreliable. Who would have thought :P. First time I saw a Mac, it crashed.
You must have been one ugly baby.
How dare you confuse Leopard with Vista!
Fanboy...
Macs can blue screen??? Wait, but how can this be??
They can, but only in 24bit colors.....
Two things:
1) I thought BSODs were unique to Windows... Never used a mac before, so wouldn't know.
2) Is that the Mac BSOD? Funky...
I guess it's not just Windows that has crashes, huh...
1. Usually you get a kernel panic, which is a dimmed screen with a message telling you to reboot the computer. But this is actually a blue screen, but not like a Windows BSOD. It's just a lite blue screen that doesn't go away (I think)...
2. No, that's not Leopard's blue screen... Not by a longshot.
Yes Mac crashes.. don't you remember the little bomb in elementary school? ;)
@ Jerry
Oh yeah, i remember the little bomb - freakin awesome!
Just played with it over and over...
Before I say anything, let me just sya that I like Engadget. I really do. I like the concept of macs, just not their obscene pricing. So I run Vista on a homebuilt computer. Now, Leopard, the be all end all, gets massive BSOD's. Engadget mutters hardly a foul word against Apple. If MSFT pulled htat with Vista (Im yet to have a BSOD with Vista after over 11 months), Endgagdet would be all over them with the bashing. That subtle Engadget style bashing with quick wit and humor. Bashing nonetheless. I know its hard to be unbiased, but comon guys open your eyes alil huh? Also, when you do a comparo between two OS's, make sure u read up on the one OS before you take points away from it for feautres that it has but you are unaware of.
BSOD is a COMPLETE misnomer in this case - it has nothing in common with the Windows BSOD. On first boot, the system will "hang" on a pure blue screen, which is just the choice of screen color Apple made for when OS X is booting. This is no more a BSOD than the Windows XP/Vista scrolling-boot-bar is. Also, there are many reports that if you wait long enough, Leopard will indeed boot (probably just ends up completely ignoring APE altogether and continues along on its boot process after a while). This is of course not an ideal solution (in some cases, it took waiting literal HOURS) - the ideal solution is to uninstall APE.
Moreoever, this is entirely due to Unsanity's APE (Application Enhancer), which is known to be an UGLY hack that, considering it broke between different releases of Tiger, is not surprising that it is broken in Leopard. Also, Unsanity's website lists APE as leopard-incompatible. I personally hope they never fix it - read up on just how APE works and you'll wonder who in their right mind would write an application to do that.
And for the record, no, I wouldn't bash Microsoft if, say, WindowBlinds (which hacks Windows in a similar way that APE hacks OS X) broke Windows. I'd bash the people that make WindowBlinds.
And I'd assume that Engadget would do the same.
@ manifesto.
well most of the time Windows doesn't cause BSOD, it's the faulty, buggy drivers provided by hardware manufacturers. Are you bitching at them? No......
He's not bitching at anybody, actually. So you're correct. No, he is not bitching at the hardware venders that make faulty drivers.
@ wireless.nemo
Actually, I have often bashed Nvidia over how crap-tacular their Vista support has been, and don't get me started on Polaroid or Epson. However, somehow, I think that would be offtopic :)
Also, there's no "i" in manfesto.
CTRL+ALT+DEL -> Proccesses -> Show processes from all users -> crss.exe -> End Process
And now you have seen a BSOD in Windows Vista. What a horrid operating system, bluscreening when you kill system processes.
Does Vista actually let you terminate crss via process manager, or is that more mac propaganda? I havent tried vista yet (it seems worthless) but XP blocks morons from terminating system processes with task manager.
I think it is funny how people still think there is price differential on Apple hardware.
I just did a complete, feature by feature comparison of the Dell Inspiron (the hot 13" that everyone seems to like) vs. the Macbook.
Out of 25 features, Apple was ahead on five, Dell was ahead on another five (neither vendor by much, just slightly different) and they were dead-on the same on the other 10 features.
And the Apple, with a fully supported UNIX-based OS, was $100 less. Hmmm....
I did the comparison because I honestly don't care which one I use, I'm an expert with both operating systems. I think everyone should do it.
And yes, I understand that you can cobble together a Windows PC from misc. parts you have laying around in your closet, or that you can get $500 worth of stuff from Newegg and build a functional PC yourself (I've done it). I'm talking about doing a comparison feature by feature. Warranty, each hardware specification, etc. Do that, and I think you will find that Apple is extremely competitive.
But that wouldn't be rational now, would it?
You can't terminate csrss from task manager. Nice try.
Oh damn. I
...forgot to finish the sentence, maybe? :)
I need cleardock to survive.
Its one possibility that he may meant to say "Aye!!" like a pirate. I don't know... but i like pirates!
LMAO, imagine if that was Leopard's BSOD! XD
BTW, this really applies to those that have Unsanity's software. Just go to their website, get the latest 2.0.3 version, update it, THEN upgrade to Leopard. http://unsanity.net/ape-203.dmg
I guess Engadget has other things more important than reporting some haxie issue with the new OS.
Again, the minority with this issue are those with Unsanity's APE (update to version 2.0.3 BEFORE installing 10.5).
It's ironic that, like the iPhone, this 'bsod' really applies to those that wish to alter the sound/look of their interfaces. Not saying you should always take whatever the vendor offers (in this case, Apple), but still, I quit using stuff like themes ages ago, because they are simply an unstable hack. Kinda like the iPhone hacks. Ooh!
WindowBlinds works great once you get it working. Its the main reason i think vista is one ugly baby when i can just grab a skin off deviantart thats looks amazing.
To each his own.
Next think you know you will be hearing that there is a virus for a Mac
Well, to be fair, there are actually viruses for the Mac, they just aren't propogating in the wild. They are proof of concepts developed by researchers and academics, but you would be surprised how many there are. Safari itself is a giant blinking magnet for such efforts and I find it odd that of all the applications that Apple chose to sandbox (though not in the proper sense) they ignored their web browser. I can't think of a more potentially vulnerable outward facing component running on the system, but that is a rant for another day.
On the topic at hand, I don't think this (the actually story, not the subject of your post) is horribly surprising. Leopard may not be the under the covers leap in architecture that Vista was (Vista was roughly a 60% code rewrite even if much of the effort is unnoticed, hence the 5 years of development) but I would still expect any application that hooks into the kernal to need at least a bit of updating to play nice given the numurous changes. And any third party code that hooks into kernal space is a potential source of hangs and crashes, regardless of OS (fanboys on both sides, settle down. It happens to both OS vendors and is usually a 3rd parties fault. Change is innevitable, and actually desired. The OS vendor cannot feasibly be responsible for making sure all third parties can actually adapt to the change)
For the record though, OS X doesn't BSOD in the same way as Windows NT based OSes (amusingly the term was popularized with the 9x line that also don't truly BSOD even if they have a blue stall screen of the same color). BSOD refers specifically to the blue screen crash dump spew that happens after a component (usually a driver) toasts the windows kernel, and generally you don't see it much since 2000 (not just because the OS is generally hardened and more stable, but also because it often doesn't perform a dump first and simply reboots). The Apple kernel panic response is to blacken the whole screen and freeze input. It sometimes (but rarely) recovers and proceeds but most of the time a reboot takes place to restore the system. In this instance though, the OS is stalling at load time before it is at a point to display true kernel panic behavior.
Random trivia, since 2000 there is also a darker blue crash screen that gets displayed when hardware is hosed. Those screens make me cry because it means I need to fork out money to fix the problem instead of just rebooting or tinkering with software.
I had this experience, It's not leopard that causes the problem, but rather the application enhancer, apple can't guarantee that all programs will be compatible with leopard, but so far I like a lot. Although I had to do archive and install.
See, it's stuff like this that reminds me that despite the inconveniences, doing fresh installs of any 10.x.0 OS never hurt anybody.
not much of an inconvenience as both documents and apps migrate to the new OS X with ease. I don't see the point in upgrading vs a new install - no advantages, many pitfalls, so why do it?
I think I will wait a while to see what bugs shake out before I get the newest OS.
They don't call them 'public betas' for no reason...
This is the real deal not a public beta - they really should have gone with another color instead of blue, so as not to draw the camparison...
"Crash Different"
Yes, I really wish Apple would have dedicated the man hours and research required into what color the boot-up screen is. It hangs when the OS is starting -- imagine WinXP/Vista hanging where the 'progress' bar is when you turn on the machine, this is the same exact thing.
What a lot of people seem to be missing in their rush to gloat about a problem in OS X, is that these problems are caused by a hack.
I'm not saying that Apple software is bug free (far from it actually), but Application Enhancer is a big, ugly, nasty hack, and I've always refused to put it on any of my systems, even before all of this Leopard blue screen stuff happened.
It's been known for a while that APE is a problem, and many people strongly discourage its use. The problem is that a lot of add ons rely on it as a framework, so people end up installing it without realizing what they're doing.
A selection of quotes from Wikipedia to drive this home:
"Many developers ... advise users to remove Application Enhancer modules, the Application Enhancer framework, and the Application Enhancer daemon before contacting customer support for help with their applications."
"Application Enhancer modules are also a source of controversy amongst system administrators who regularly run into stability issues on computers running the Application Enhancer framework."
"The Application Enhancer framework has also been a source of controversy for security issues exposed in the Month of Apple Bugs when it was found Unsanity were leaving a root-enabled executable fully accessible (and writable) by non-root accounts."
In short, it's a terrible piece of software, and no one should have it installed.
on one hand if Apple would get their head out of their ass and add customization to their OS people wouldn't be downloading apps such as these.
On the other hand users should know better then to install such apps on a newly released OS that developers have had less then 2 days access to. (Developers didn't get access to the GM until Late Friday.)
So in both cases I'd guess 30% of this is Apple's fault. The rest is all about a dumb user.
Anyone who installs software that dicks with the OS at a low level deserves all the problems that come with it. I mean you really need to be a moron to install this software so soon after Leopard is released. I mean for the love of god developers got their hands on the gold master only days ago. Personally I won't go near this software until next spring at the earliest.
Watch how in a month all the iPeople will be back on the "you-suck-if-you-use-windows" band wagon. Yeah, it just works - except when it don't.
Customizing an Apple device... Oh noes...
Any person who ventures beyond the safe confines of Job's grand vision of the user experience should know the risk.
Then again, the end user should have kept their APE up to date. Any check compatibility of all their programs before upgrading. It seems like APE 2.0.3 is Leopard safe.
I have Application Enhancer installed and had no problems upgrading to Leopard.
Another source for Unsanity's APE insanity: Logitech. If you have a Logitech mouse and you installed their drivers you also installed APE as part of the process. I have no idea why Logitech uses this crap software, but if they have to take shortcuts like this I for one will not have anything to do with their products in future.
I have a feeling Logitech uses APE in order to reassign their mouse buttons to do different things based upon the program currently active. Seems like they took an easy shortcut to implement this functionality on a MAC.
I could be totally off-base, but that just seems like the most logical reason that they chose to use APE.
Never Blue screened with Vista. I think now everyone will switch to Vista cause Macs and Apples and Jobs suck.
Oh wait that is what the opposite side usually says.
I use most of Unsanity's haxies, and I miss them in Leopard. Having said that, perhaps Unsanity could have sent out a mass email saying that they weren't sure that APE and the rest would work reliably with 10.5 and had not been tested yet, and ask that all users disable all Unsanity haxies until testing was complete. I don't think that would have been that difficult, and then the onus of problems due to old versions of APE causing installation headaches would have fallen on the enduser, not on Unsanity. Just my two cents.
I agree that haxies (by definition) are "hacks" and sophisticated ones at that. However, they wouldn't be needed if Apple didn't make an active effort to prevent themes from being used, allow different fonts as the standard display font, etc. Unsanity exists because Apple has the standard "Our way or the highway" approach when it comes to the appearance of Tiger, Leopard, etc.
this happened to me. i brought it to the geniusbar today, and they couldn't help. so i went on the mac forums and there was a solution there. all you had to do was go into the library folder from target mode and delete a few APE files. i rebooted after that everything went fine. on this issue, apple is way behind for not telling thier employees about the solution posted on thier forums. it is a stupid mistake on both apple and APE's part. Apple for not realizing that this would happen, and APE for messing around with the OS like that.
This is not even close to a windows BSOD error. This is a system hack that is incompatible with a new os. When the computer boots the hack prevents the os from fully loading the blue screen is just the os load screen, not an error screen. To even compare this to windows locking up is ludacris. I don't care what OS you use but use your brain before you post nonsense trying to compare this to some of windows failures in the past. If you install a system level hack and then install a new version of an os the same day it is released, yes you will probably run into problems no matter what os you are on. Besides, this is nothing new, application enhancer has always had compatibility problems whenever the OS has a major upgrade. Remember, this is a low level system hack, not a program.
Sorry,
I forgot this is Apple, Mac, Jobs and we are supposed to cut them a huge amount of slack and nothing they do can be wrong. Only Windows gets no slack and false propaganda.
Can't we all just get along already?
Just as a side note, Mac OS X never experiences a "Blue Screen of Death." It does, however, undergo the equally horrid "Gray Screen of Panic and Disarray (GSPD)."
oh noes! my DOS Hack recks myne windows 98.
I've got an idea! Instead of ranting on about how M$ has BSODs, and how Apple doesn't get blamed for BSODs, why doesn't everyone use Ubuntu, where theres no such thing (unless of course you configure your xorg.conf wrong)
but of course, thats besides the point. After all, there is such thing as ubuntu without a GUI! Then you'll REALLY never get a bsod! A little bit useless for most peoples needs, but it still exists.
Linux zealots ftw.
It's OK - Microosft has problems occaseionally with THEIR service pack installs, too.
Because I cant get Photoshop to run on Linux.
And there's no way I'm going to switch to Gimp.
@jtc970
Hey I have photoshop 7.0.1 running on WINE right now. It works fine. And You know there is a package you can download to turn gimp into something REALLY REALLY similar to photoshop. Its pretty awesome. And on top of that its faster and I think its more robust than photoshop.
but still, you gotta spend the time to find these things (or to configure wine lol)
Gimp could never compare to the awesomeness that is CS3.
and as far as I know WINE wont work with anything over v7
Once Adobe builds a Linux package my Vista will hit Ebay
I'll have to say that I'm impressed with Gusty Gibbon so far except it seems to be suffering alot of 'Grey Windows of Non-Responsiveness' which seem related to flash in firefox... had it also happen when trying to burn a dvd. Overall I have a Mac Mini, desktop with XP, and a laptop with Vista and Ubuntu and XP and Vista have probably been the most solid and stable especially considering the abuse which my XP has endured from hardware changes, windowblinds, registry edits, and just constant use. Sadly I've not found much use for my Mac Mini other than a music server or browsing the web while my XP machine is doing other things.
"It just works...unless you try to download software and use the mac as a computer"
im sorry dave i cant let you do that...
Gosh that blue Leopard fur graphic sure is pretty... can we get a hi-res desktop background version of that? And in the original non-blue version perhaps? An Engadget exclusive download? :)
if you have two macs you can target boot the problem mac and get at the hard drive though the other mac, its a much easier way to delate unsanity apps
Why is this news? Third party software crashes system, news at eleven!
That's funny. I recently went through desktops, feature to feature, and with Dell (and Dell coupons) you could get a computer with more memory and a faster processor for about 60% the price of a Mac.
"Anyone who installs software that dicks with the OS at a low level deserves all the problems that come with it. "
Yeah, anyone who dares want a device driver to get their printer to work is a dumb ass. All of those folks that want robust development tools are tools themselves for using applications that hook into the kernel JIT debugger. Anyone with file recovery tools or other system utilities is a damn moron.
Not all third party code can function entirely in user space and still achieve their purpose. Kernel mode applications have their place, but as soon as code crosses that boundry it should be held to MUCH higher standards than entirely user mode applications. There is a reason that Vista 64bit requires all 3rd party kernel space code go through a certification process (it is a shame that they don't for the 32 bit version, but app compat still holds too much weight in redmond). The issue here isn't that users are dumb for running kernel mode software, but that they are doing so from a less than reputable source. APE is crap.
arg, I am an idiot. This was supposed to be a reply to a dude on the first page who claimed anyone running low level software was an idiot.
HOLD ON HERE! ....with regard to that BLUE SCREEN supposed problem...... way too many people are jumping to conclusions here....... I too had seen this blank blue screen on install of Leopard on my G4 Laptop... of course i cannot speak for anyone els... but when the blue screen appeared and did not seem to go away... rather than give up and assume that it crashed... i had patients and let the computer sit for about 10 min... SURE enough... eventually... the computer booted up... im assuming that the upgrade just took a long time... granted... im on a G4 Laptop... not one of those fast and fancy INTEL models... needless to say... it DID eventually start up and i have not seen any major issues... sure there a few bugs... but most are minor enough for me to continue to work until there is an update... AND just for the record... im not running a simple setup... i have tons of software that was already installed... some are major applications like Adobe CS 3 as well as other third party software ...all working without issues.... i have to say... im IMPRESSED with LEOPARD... HAVE PATIENTS OUT THERE PEOPLE... Realize that if you are doing Archive and Install... A lot of your hard drives out there are HUGE... large amounts of data take time to backup... and regular upgrades or installs will take time as well... especially on older macs...