The creators of APE on Saturday denied that their application-enhancement framework is responsible for blue-screening Macs being upgraded to Leopard. Apple Inc., however, blamed the software in a support document advising users to delete APE from their machines. Within hours of Leopard"s Friday debut, users began reporting a "blue screen of death" that appeared after running the default Upgrade option. On affected Macs, the blue screen stymied the required restart after the install, locking users out of their computers.
The Installation and Setup forum on Apple"s support site was quickly flooded with messages, including one that fingered Unsanity LLC"s APE (Application Enhancer), software required to run Mac customizing haxies such as ShapeShifter, as the culprit. A user identified as Chris Mcculloh posted instructions on manually deleting APE using the Unix command line to kick the Mac through the restart. Others spread Mcculloh"s instructions to new threads on the Apple forum, and reports of success poured in. "This fix seemed to work perfectly for me," said TuHolmes.