Various applications fail to launch with "CarbonLib" errors

For some users, common and well-known applications such as Word, Excel, and others have been quitting with errors that mention various Carbon libraries.

Apple Discussions poster Shawn Puyear writes:

"When trying to open several different apps, an error message 'Application Launch Failure' displays. The text of the message is: The application 'Flash Professional' could not be launched because of a shared library error: 'Flash CarbonLib CFMPriv_OpenScripting"

Carbon is the application programming interface (API) that Apple developed to easily port Classic applications (OS 9 and earlier) to Mac OS X. Most of the Carbon functions are located in a common library called "CarbonLib", which is accessed by many Carbon applications. If there is a problem with this library, many Carbon applications, or those that still contain Carbon function calls may not run properly. While most newer applications are built using the Cocoa API, many still contain at least some Carbon function calls.

There are several reasons CarbonLib library might be inaccessible, including faulty permissions and improper operating system update installation. In these cases, the following fixes may help.

Repair permissions on the boot drive If a simple permissions error is preventing proper access to CarbonLib, users should launch Disk Utility and perform a permissions repair on the startup drive, then reattempt the previoulsy faulty launches.

Reapply the latest operating system update Some users have found that the problem can be solve dby reapplying the latest Mac OS X update, version 10.5.4. We recommend that users apply the update per these recommendations.

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