Problems With Panther? Look Here.

In what will hopefully be the very last release of the 3.6 cycle, 3.6.14 is now released. This release is going to be our last attempt for the 3.6 series at working around the problems Apple has introduced into Panther by not testing their major OS upgrades enough. We have hopefully found a sufficient method to workaround the problem, but as always, more problems could crop up. Please let us know either here or directly in email to me ( [email protected] ) if 3.6.14 has had any effect on succesfully running LimeWire on corrupted Panther systems.

Thanks.

Panther installed and ran well for me at first. However, after a few days problems with text entry appeared. This is especially noticable in Mail, but also applies when entering text into web pages displayed by OmniWeb. The first problem to appear is duplication of the character preceeding typing of a <space>. Text entry bugginess becomes worse rapidly when I attempt Drag and Drop or Cut and Paste. Eventually the message becomes unresponsive to any editing. After this point further attempts to edit lead to deletion of chunks of text from the tail of the message. Subsequent new mail messages display the same problems, as does text entry in OmniWeb text boxes, but I believe Nisus Writer is not affected by this problem. I believe that Mail and OW use Panther's text editing capabilities while NW may have its own text processing. The only way I have found to recover from this problem is a full re-install of Panther. I am on my third installation.

Since describing this problem on Apple's discussion board (Discussions >Mac OS X >Mac OS X v10.3 Panther >Mail and Address Book >text editing problems) two users have posted independent confirmation of the problem. A bug report has been submitted to Apple.

When these problems developed I was running LimeWire 3.6.10 (?). Since my most recent install of Panther on November 1, I have not run LimeWire and the editing problem has not reappeared. I never had a problem of LW not starting, and LW seemed to upload and download files OK even before the release of 3.6.14. I have not tested 3.6.14 because I am not ready to install Panther again.

Might my text editing problems be related to the known Java bugs in Panther?