APC's UPS units: shut-down problems (especially with older Macs)

Barbara Passman received the following reply from Jonathan Hardges, of APC, explaining with their UPS (Uninterruptable Power Supply) units (such as the Back-UPS Pro 500) cannot do an automatic shutdown: Apple's native support for UPS's unfortunately does not include support for "older" hardware. Only "new world" machines are supported. A beige G3, even with a USB card installed, is not supported. Unfortunately there is no workaround for this. Installing a USB card is not enough. The fundamental reason for the lack of support is that the USB power class driver is dependent on Power Manager 2.0 level support on this hardware. Power Manager will not support a UPS on a beige G3. FYI, the power class driver is not a stand-alone driver that can be downloaded. It exists as a code fragment called "USBPowerClassLib" in the "USB Device Extension" extension. On older systems this code fragment may exist in the extension, but it will not load when the system boots, because the hardware is unsupported by Power Manager 2.0. Therefore when APC Shutdown Manager checks for the presence of this driver, it finds that it is not loaded into memory and issues the warning." Steve Graesser had similar problems, including startup crashes associated with the new APC Shutdown Manager v1.0 software. See also previous coverage.