Troubleshooting Mac OS X 10.2.2: HP Comm AppleScript; System Profiler Workaround; more

AppleScript to kill HP Communications process We previously reported that Hewlett Packard's "HP Communications (version 4.6.3)" component is the culprit behind at least some of the reports detailing overall system sluggishness after applying the Mac OS X 10.2.2 update. Most reports indicate that the problem takes hold after a few hours of normal operation, and result in slower menu access, increased application launch times, and delayed window drawing in the Finder. Process Manager displays gradually increasing processor usage from the application, rising upwards of 60 percent in most instances.

A MacFixIt reader sent us an AppleScript that will kill the HP Communications process without accessing any other utilities:

"Users using this AppleScript will have to select the 'HP Communications' program from a dialog box of installed applications when they run it the first time. One other caveat, don't have 'HP Comm' in the name of the Applescript as the embedded shell script will get confused about which processes to quit. Here's the script:

set pid to ""
set kill to "false"
set pid to do shell script "ps -ax | grep -v grep | grep 'HP Comm' |awk '{ print $1 }'"
if not (pid = "") then
do shell script "kill " & pid
set kill to the result
else
beep
end if
(*if (kill = "") then display dialog "Process killed"*)
open application "HP Communications"
say "HP Communications reopened"

Other users report success with open source drivers located at http://www.linuxprinting.org/printer_list.cgi?make=HP.

DNS Lookup Workaround We continue to receive citations of DNS Lookup failures after applying the Mac OS X 10.2.2 update. The problems cause an inability to resolve host names under the Domain Name System, and affects a broad variety of networked applications including Internet Explorer and Eudora. Charles McCoy writes:

"Internet Explorer will return a 'The specified server could not be found' error for perhaps 50 percent (or more) of the URL's, while Eudora returns 'Error involving Domain Name System. -3170; The domain name does not exist. {37:438' error for each mail account I access."

James Lawton reports a somewhat tedious workaround that has resulted in success on his Mac OS X 10.2.2 configuration:

"My workaround uses the 'host' command in Terminal, which is a command line interface to the lookupd. For each unresolved name, I use 'host -a <name>" (e.g. 'host -a news.yahoo.com'), which gets 'any' available information about the host. This seems to reset any cached information about the offending host, and allows the browser to find it."

Apple speaks on System Profiler Crashes We previously reported Apple System Profiler crashes on a variety of system configurations running Mac OS X 10.2.x. Apple's Developer Connection has now responded to users with the following statement:

"Thank you for contacting the Apple Developer Connection regarding the Apple System Profiler on Mac OS 10.2.2. Please know that I have escalated your request to our appropriate department for their review. We expect to have a response for you very soon."

The problem causes Apple System Profiler to crash after only a few seconds of operation, usually after displaying the first tab of information.

Posters to Apple's Discussion boards point to Font Reserve as a possible source of the unexpected quits. On user writes:

"My problem was font reserve. When I installed font reserve it moved fonts out of the system>library>fonts into a folder named 'Fonts Moved From Font Folders.' The missing fonts were causing the hangs and crashes. I booted into OS 9 and copied the fonts back, when I restarted in X everything worked fine."

USB Devices culprits in sleep problem? Steve Solomon reports narrowing down a widely reported sleep issue to an external floppy drive. The problem renders some Macs, particularly the Power Mac G4 Mirrored Drive Door modles, unable to sleep, with the fans never powering down:

"I ran separate tests with each of my attached USB devices to see if one of them is the cause of the failure to sleep. It turns out that my VSD USB floppy drive, model FDUSB, is the culprit. Only when this drive is attached at the time of attempted sleep is there a problem. There are no drivers for this drive. It works natively in prior versions of Mac OS X."

Unconfirmed Issues We are still working with a number of unconfirmed issues. If you are having similar problems or have any feedback on the issues, drop us a line.

Timbutktu Pro Andrew Dinsdale reports minor glitches in Timbuktu Pro after updating: "Just updated to OSX 10.2.2 (Dual 1GHz Mirrored Drives/768Mb Ram) and Timbuktu 6.02 now sometimes initialises and sometimes not. Icon appeared in menubar, and then disappeared after waking from sleep."

Mail.app Tom Koch reports that his .Mac e-mail account's on-volume preference file was corrupted after installing Mac OS X 10.2.2, leaving it inaccessible via Mail.app. "My main Mac.com account disappeared. I checked preferences, and found my main account listed as 'Inactive', and in trying to reactivate it, I kept getting an error message of 'Invalid Username: The user name field cannot be empty.' I noticed that the User Name field indeed was empty, but I am unable to fill it in with the user name. I was able to 'fix' it by creating a new account (renamed 'username2', and after backing up the entire "Mail" folder in the User Library) and put in the same info as the other account used to contain, username and password, etc."

Keypad no longer functioning Cynthia Lockley, along with a handful of other readers, report that their numeric keypad no longer functions after upgrading to Mac OS X 10.2.2.

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