While I was testing Apple's seeds of Panther, I ran into a small problem when I tried to install and update Microsoft Office v.X. I think this might help some folks using these updaters (and possibly other Vise updaters). The Office 'drag and drop' installation went fine, but the Office v.X 10.1.2 updater seemed to hang at startup when displaying a "Gathering information..." popup. Quite annoying.
A small look at the currently running processes helped me to solve this mystery: a "webdav mount" process was working quietly along with the installer. Thanks to Panther, if you have a .mac account and if you have activated the iDisk auto-sync feature, your computer will automatically mount your iDisk whenever connected to Internet.
It was the case here, and the updater was busy looking for Office through all mounted volumes, including the whole iDisk, with its "software" directory provided by Apple. Given the tremendous speed of iDisk's webdav, it can take a few hours to achieve this task.
The fix for this problem is pretty simple: just disconnect from Internet when running some Vise updaters, including Office's, and everything goes fine afterwards.
[robg adds: I had this happen with a separate updater this weekend, so I figure this is quite relevant!]
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20031010180653736