Security Update 2005-007 1.1 Special Report: Third-party Applications

CNET staff

Sept. 2, 2009 12:05 p.m. PT

3 min read

VLC crashing with certain ATI Radeon cards MacFixIt reader Keith Takayesu reports an issue where the shareware video playing software VLC (VideoLan Client) repeatedly crashes after a few minutes of video after Security Update 2005-007 is applied. The problem seems to be specific to the Radeon 9200 graphics card at this point:

"The biggest problem seems to be a video crash when playing a video via VLC. My Radeon 9200 on my Cube was acting up (hmm, come to think about it, since Security Update 2005 v1.0), so I had gone back to my Radeon 7000. I have them both set up so that the S-Video goes to the TV for movie playback.

"I tried playing some movies (from the hard drive) on VLC today, after the latest update 1.1. The movie would play fine for 5-6 minutes, then the video screen and Mac display totally freeze. The weird thing is that the audio kept going, as though everything was running fine. However, I was totally locked out, only a hard reset would get me out of it. I repeated it with several different movies, just to make sure it wasn't the movie crashing everything. Same thing, video locks up after 5-6 minutes or so.

"I then played the movie in fullscreen mode on the Mac screen, and it would play through without crashing anything. I'm going to re-install the Radeon 9200, and see if the same thing happens.

"Luckily, I keep a backup system on another drive, this one does not have any of the Security Updates on it yet. VLC runs fine on that system, using the Radeon 7000 S-Video out. No video crashes at all."

QuickMail font conflict Richard Spensley reports a QuickMail font conflict apparent after Security Update 2005-007 which was resolved by discontinuing use of a specific font style:

"I applied the Security Update this morning and ran into problems with Outpsring's QuickMail 3.5.2. It would not start up at all and I suspected that it may be font-related so I disabled Suitcase but that did not work. When I looked on Macfixit I saw the advice about font issues so I tried removing the "com.apple.ATS" folder - this did not work either. The Console crash log seemed to point towards a font problem

"I could not think what to do so, in the end, I removed the QuickMail Preferences folder from it's normal location. QuickMail then started fine (albeit without my prefs). I put the Prefs back, QuickMail crashed. I removed just the "QM Pro Client Prefs" and it started fine, with the correct account info, I just needed to go through and set my prefs for views, behaviour, fonts - ah, fonts! As soon as I set my font preferences back to the way I usually have them (Verdana as the list view and Anti-aliasing on) and opened the Inbox, QuickMail crashed again! If I turned off Anti-aliasing then QuickMail worked fine. If I changed the font to something else and turned Anti-aliasing on again then it also worked fine.

"So, it appears, on my system at least, that the Anti-aliasing of Verdana (specifically) in QuickMail was causing the problem. Go figure!"