The Cult of the Cool Mac: Made with 100% USDA real meat!

A friend of mine complained that Classic wouldn't start up after upgrading to OS X 10.3.4. Whenever it was launched, the Classic application attempted to install updated extensions in her Classic System Folder, but failed.

Repairing permissions didn't help. We examined the Classic Startup application in the System/Library/CoreServices folder. The OS X update had replaced version 1.8 with version 1.8.2. I had her swap in version 1.8 from a backup, but when she tried to run it she got this error: "You are running classic without superuser (root) Privileges."

Well, I had her repair permissions again and the Disk Utility did find some errors in Classic Startup. When those permissions were repaired, she could launch Classic without a problem.

I'm not certain what it is about her machine that it doesn't like version 1.8.2 of the Classic Startup application, but if the same thing happens to you, now you know how to fix it!