How To identify and disable system extensions that cause other apps to crash

Feb 27, '12 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: tempel

Sometimes, people contact me because software of mine, such as Find Any File, crashes mysteriously at launch. Often it turns out that this is caused by an incompatibility or bug in some other software that tries to enhance general Mac OS X functionality. The difficulty is to figure out which software is the culprit, in order to disable it and/or notify its maker and ask to get this resolved.

Sometimes, one can get a hint by looking at the detailed Crash Report one can find when opening the Console app. It will contain a long list of 'Binary Images,' listing which software components are loaded along with the app that crashes.

Many of those components are so-called Frameworks and 'libs' provided by Apple as part of OS X; but they're usually not the culprit. Then, there are other parts, installed by other apps or even installed explicitly by you for a particular purpose.

However, analysing these reports is difficult and may not lead to success, either. Instead, I'll try to give you some pointers that are often helping and do not require to understand the Crash Report contents.

In any case, the hard part is always that the crash happens only on someone else's computer and I can't reproduce it to find out what's going wrong. On Mac OS before X, there was the great Conflict Catcher software sorting such problems out, but there's no such thing for OS X.

Hence, I'm trying to give a little guidance to users who experience such crashes in the hopes it'll make their system more stable.

I've posted the article on my web site, where I might be improving it over time, based on feedback I hope to receive.

[crarko adds: The author suggested, and I considered, posting the text of the article here. But the page he's put up is heavily and well-illustrated, and is also evolving based on feedback. I don't think I can do any better than to refer you all to the original article.]

Comments (5)


Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20110821032736354