Sunday, October 6, 2002

I had a long weblog entry almost finished a few days ago describing what I did to troubleshoot a particularly annoying OS X problem. Then Chimera crashed, and I haven't had the time to write it again. The upshot is: I figured out what was causing the Self problem I was having on Tuesday. Ittec, a FinderPop-like shareware utility for OS X, includes an Application Enhancer module named Camel.ape. I had two copies of it installed, one in /Library/Application Enhancers, and one in ~/Library/Application Enhancers. Worse than the sporadic "RegisterProcess failed" error was that I couldn't unlock my keychain, denying me easy access to lots of things I needed. Removing the second copy of Camel.ape fixed the RegisterProcess problem. Removing the other copy of Camel.ape also fixed a problem that was causing the Finder to complain about a missing autorelease pool every time I clicked. All Camel.ape does is load the Ittec contextual menu module early. This ensures that Ittec's other features work immediately, instead of only after you've opened a contextual menu and given the module a chance to load otherwise. I've already heard from one person who was having the RegisterProcess problem and couldn't track it down, so here's hoping Google indexes this page soon. 11:41:02 PM | reply []