When Office apps won't launch: a fix for update_prebinding
If update_prebinding itself fails, you may be able to fix it.
Reader Paul wrote in to complain that after installing the Microsoft Office 2004 11.3.6 update, his Office applications were refusing to launch. This kind of thing has happened often enough in the past that we've a standard response: try to update prebindings, as we advised when similar difficulties struck after the previous Office 2004 update. Also, in general, for Intel users, we have suggested that when Rosetta applications won't launch, it's a good idea to update prebindings. This is also mentioned in our tutorial on what to do when applications won't launch.
In this case, however, Paul found that the attempt to update prebindings was failing. He was getting error messages like this:
update_prebinding: error: dependent dylib is not prebound
update_prebinding: error 256 running update_prebinding_core
Paul's own initiative (and, we suspect, Google) led him to an online article. The crux of that article is that (as we have mentioned now and then), there's a file that lists what frameworks and dynamic libraries should be prebound:
[code] /var/db/dyld/update-prebinding-paths.txt [/code]If you run the update_prebinding command with the -debug option turned on, presumably like this:
...you should be able to guess, by looking at the last lines printed in the Terminal, how far through that list the process got before giving up with an error. It should then be possible to comment out (by placing a # character at their start) the subsequent lines that presumably point to the troublesome area. In both the online article and in Paul's particular case, that area had to do with Java. Paul reports that he commented out the line starting:
and all the Java 1.3.1 lines after it. He then ran the update prebinding again, and the process made it it all the way through. He then rebooted, and Office was working again.
(It would also probably be wise to boot into safe mode in order to run the update_prebinding procedure, just to minimize the number of processes running while prebinding is going on. That, indeed, is one of the reasons we recommend use of safe mode while installing any update.)
It will not have escaped the attention of observant readers that Java was the very area that had to be mended after installation of the QuickTime 7.2 update prevented some Rosetta applications from launching for some users.
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