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September 27, 2006

updates

Software update goes haywire

Posted Sep. 27, ’06, 1:18 PM PT by Scott Silverman
Category | Software » Updates

Swuerror-ThumbIt’s rather ironic when the mechanism meant to help fix bugs goes buggy itself. With all the updates spurting out today, I figured now would be a great time to run Software Update, and so I proceeded.

Upon telling Software Update to “Install” the four updates it found, things went as normal. It began downloading, decompressing, and installing my updates. Meanwhile, I continued to read a few RSS feeds in Safari. A minute later I was greeted by the not-so-happy message pictured above (click image for a full version).

I quit Software Update, restarted my computer, and re-ran Software Update. This time the process repeated, but instead of coming up with an error, I was greeted by the message “The application Software Update quit unexpectedly.” Great. The application which is meant to fix bugs on my system has self-destructed.

I tried a restart and re-run one last time. To my surprise this time the three Pro Apps updates installed successfully, but the iTunes update continued to fail. iTunes 7 just seems to be chock full of bugs. Has anyone else ever encountered problems similar to these with Software Update? What might I try to fix it? I suppose I could also always go download the iTunes 7.0.1 update directly from Apple.com, but it still bothers me that there’s problems within Software Update.


4 Comments

Wes said:

This particular thing has not happened to me exactly, however I can say that the first time i used software update on my Panther-running iBook G4, I was greeted with a perpetual gear on startup. Turns out I had to reformat everything (of course, there was nothing on it anyways). Apparently, it was because I was using the programs that were being updated. Well I know now.

September 27, 2006 2:39 PM
Johnnie said:

The update went perfectly for me. I was a bit worried it wouldn't after reading this post... thankfully Gaius (my powerbook) didn't give me any troubles with the software update.

September 27, 2006 4:04 PM
Anonymous said:

Try deleting the software update download cache at /Library/Caches/com.apple.SoftwareUpdate/ and running it again.

September 27, 2006 4:10 PM
Bradley Dichter said:

In the future, don't run anything else while updates are installing.

September 27, 2006 8:17 PM

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