[workerbee]

Because I really really miss Type Reunion's functionality of yore (remember when font menus actually made sense, even in Macromedia apps?), I perhaps foolishly installed Unsanity's FontCard 1.0.3 on my 10.3.2-running PowerBook. As it did not work at all in Fireworks MX 04 -- the fonts were all grayed out in the Inspector font popup menu, and most were grayed out in the Text -> Fonts menu -- I uninstalled it, using the "deactivate" button for the application enhancer in the prefs panel.
A day later (yesterday), I decided to give it another try; seeing the same results even after deactivating FontCard for all Adobe apps, as someone suggested on VersionTracker, I again uninstalled the PrefPane and deactivated the APE, even rebooting after this to make sure everything was off.

Now this might just be a coincidence, but both times my PowerBook has crashed on waking after the Haxie uninstall and APE deactivation: on opening the PB, the login panel appeared, and freezed solid after entering 4 characters. This has never happened before, and Panther has up to now been a model of stability. Because I have FileVault turned on, hard rebooting my PB really makes me feel very uneasy.

Again, I don't know if there is any relation between the haxies in the trash, the deactivated APE, and the crash on waking the PowerBook from its first sleep after the uninstall, but haxies and related files are now strictly off-limits here, in perpetuity.

YMMV.

[Jan Van Boghout]

I don't think APE would be able to do anything related to your login window, as the haxies should only operate in the user space, not the system processes. So the freezing after 4 characters seems like something that's unrelated to it. Certainly if you trashed the APE :/

[CharlesS]

Did you trash the APE framework as well, or just the individual APE's themselves?

[gorickey]

Poor APE/Haxies/Unsanity...always the little brother and getting picked on it seems...

[workerbee]

Originally posted by CharlesS:
Did you trash the APE framework as well, or just the individual APE's themselves?

Well now they're all gone.
When the crashes occurred I had trashed the FontCard PrefPane, and only deactivated the APE framework -- which sits in /Library/Application Enhancer and needs the Admin password to install BTW, so they're system-wide IMHO -- using the deactivate button.

It probably is coincidence (there seem to be many freezing crashes in Panther), but the PowerBook has not crashed since, with several sleep-wakeup cycles.

[Holigen]

so they're system-wide IMHO

Actually, youre wrong on the system wide part. APE stands for Application Enhancer. It only effects user owned processes like applications and menu extras. The reason it needs an admin pass is primarily for safety. But again, APE doesnt affect anything at the system level

[neoTony]

gorickey/et al are right - APE isn't even loaded for the login window... it's user level only. If you suspect that any of Unsanity's products are causing the problem, collect the crash logs and send them to Slava and the guys - they're very, very receptive to fixing things.

Edit: OK, what you're experiencing isn't a hard freeze (if the mouse still moves) - that's a runaway process... usually this behavior can also occur if you absolutely max out the I/O on your machine too (you've got to try really hard though).

[workerbee]

Ummm... OK, I'll probably try out FontCard again, when the next version is out (which maybe will work with FireWorks '04)... and after a thorough backup

Thanks for the heads-up. I'll let you and Unsanity know if I get those weird login problems again.