Rosetta problem in Mac OS X 10.4.10

I noticed about a week ago that none of my MS Office apps worked. The little blue “W” just bounced a couple of times and then gave up. Weird, I thought, but I can just reinstall the program. I realized the extent of the problem when, however, the Office installer performed the same bounce-and-hide trick. When Quicken 2007 also failed, this confirmed my suspicions that Rosetta itself had somehow failed.

When update_prebinding errored out (not something expected by the support article I’d been following), I had to dig deeper. Fortunately, several others discovered a fix: commenting-out references to Java 1.3 in /var/db/dyld/update-prebinding-paths.txt. Why didn’t I think of that?