New security patch breaks Rosetta apps in Snow Leopard

Rosetta

Eric Slivka over at MacRumors is reporting that a number of users still on Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard were affected by this week’s security patch that left PowerPC apps using Apple’s Rosetta broken.

Security Update 2012-001 was released alongside OS X 10.7.3 on Wednesday in order to bring some of the security fixes found in OS X 10.7.3 to users still running Mac OS X Snow Leopard. But as noted in several discussions at Apple’s forums […] and elsewhere, users are experiencing a variety of problems with Rosetta apps following the update, including repeated crashes when trying to use any commands from the applications’ main dropdown menus. Users are reporting a significant number of applications being affected by the issue, including Microsoft Office X and 2004, older versions of Adobe Photoshop, Quicken, Filemaker 7, and various other applications that had been written to run on PowerPC chips used in Apple’s older machines.

While it is noted that some people are reverse engineering the patch, we don’t recommend you touch anything like that. If you have a backup — like you always should — from Time Machine or SuperDuper, just restore to a previously working version. If not, just hold tight until Apple fixes this. Dicking around in system files is bound to cause more problems than it’ll fix. Trust us on this.

These issues with the latest updates for Lion and Snow Leopard just emphasize how important backups are. I ran into the horrid “CUI” issue on my main machine, but I have hourly backups that had me up and going within hours. Please take a moment and set up a backup system if you haven’t already.

Hat tip to MacRumors
Image Credit: Hans Hillewaert

Grant is a writer from Delaware. In his spare time, Grant maintains a personal blog, hosts The Weekly Roar, hosts Quadcast, and writes for video games.