Troubleshooting Mac OS X 10.2.1: Required Fonts Conflict; Sibelius pitch bending, fix; FileMaker documents; more

Required fonts conflict Certain components of Mac OS X 10.2.1 require the "Helvetica" font. However, design houses often delete the pre-installed default fonts (including Helvetica) so they will not be in conflict with their PostScript counterparts.

As evidenced by Bob Bousfield's report, this problem can have dire consequences:

"After installing installing the 10.2.1 update on three of our in-house machines, I became aware of an issue with the Software Update application. When a check was selected from System Preferences-Software Update the actual Software Update application would open (showing in the Dock), pause without displaying any screen panels, then close with the System displaying an 'unexpectedly quit' message.

"Looking at the Console log it became clear that the SU application was trying to locate and use the Helvetica font. However, since these machines were going to be used by our designers as part of the setup I had disabled (as an admin user) all of the supplied Apple fonts that would conflict with the Postscript versions that we use in-house - these of course included the standards Courier, Times and Helvetica.

"Interestingly both Extensis and Diamondsoft recommend that all of these fonts are disabled and managed through their respective font management applications. There was a version of Helvetica loaded by Suitcase on these machines but this was the Adobe PS version, not Apple's."

Sibelius pitch bending, fix Peter Kirn reports a confirmed bug with the music notation tool Sibelius, and a partial fix:

"This is a problem with Sibelius 2 (all versions) and Mac OS X Jaguar (10.2.x) with QuickTime 6 (included). QuickTime Music Instruments creates a horrible pitch bending effect when used for playback due to excessive (to the extreme) aftertouch response. The fix is to disable 'Send reset controllers at start' in the Play | Playback Options dialogue. Unfortunately, this problem is not resolved for 'play as you click' playback."

FileMaker Pro 6.0v3 document launching Scott Rose notes that under Mac OS X 10.2.1, FileMaker Pro 6.0v3 will not display documents launched from the Finder unless it is already running:

"In order to see this problem in action, you need to make sure that FileMaker Pro 6.0v3 is not running on your machine. Then, double-click on a FileMaker Pro 6 document that's sitting on your hard drive. If FileMaker Pro 6 isn't already running, then FileMaker Pro 6 launches. This is the behavior that you would expect."

"However, the problem is that once FileMaker Pro 6 launches, the FileMaker document does not open up afterwards. FileMaker Pro 6 just launches with no active windows. You have to double-click the document again (in the Finder) in order to open up the document."

Deleting MSN Messenger Preferences Dan Carlson reports that deleting MSN Messenger's preferences from the Library folder in mac OS X 10.2.1 resolves connection difficulties:

"After I upgraded from Mac OS X 10.1.5 to Mac OS X10.2, I found that I could not connect to the MSN IM network -- the application would start up normally, but the connection would not go through... and I would then receive the message "the service is not available or you may not be connected to the
Internet."

"Fortunately, I received a response from Microsoft support this morning. All you have to do is delete the file 'MSN Messenger Preferences' in the /Users/[username]/Library/Preferences/Microsoft/ directory. The messenger now appears to work perfectly."

Symantec Catch-22 Jeff Berman notes a problematic situation with Symantec's system for automatically distributing software updates:

"After upgrading to Mac OS X 10.2.1, I discovered that Norton AntiVirus 8.0.3 and Norton Utilities 7.0 no longer functioned properly.

"A trip to the Symantec web site yielded a web page explaining that these applications 'are compatible with Mac OS X v10.2 after the user downloads the free product inline updates via the products' built-in LiveUpdate feature.' However, the page also indicates that 'users should run LiveUpdate to obtain and install the inline update prior to installing Mac OS X 10.2 on their system.'

"Unfortunately, 10.2 was already running on my system when I read this. And when I tried using the LiveUpdate application to download the update, the LiveUpdate application would crash."

Currently, the only solution seems to be using a Mac OS X 10.1 environment to update both Norton Utilities and AntiVirus, then moving to a Mac OS X 10.2 volume.