Right, if any of you own a Mac with Leopard on it… AVOID GLOWFORM FIREWALL LIKE THE PLAGUE. Yes its my fault for trying it out without reading other people’s comments on http://osx.iusethis.com before installing it but in my curiosity I just went ahead and tried it.
Big mistake, apple discussion forums and comments on iusethis all say that it breaks Leopard. It doesn’t just temporarily break things, in my case I installed it, ran it, it crashed, then every other program running crashed, then i couldn’t log out or restart! Only thing left was to hold the power button and try and restart and uninstall.
Well that didn’t work because on boot up, you can’t get past the blue screen before the login window. Most people with this problem have managed to safe boot their mac and delete the application files. Just my luck that I can’t even get that far!
So yes, avoid this software completely! More fool me for thinking that I could need more than the OS X built in firewall. Thankfully I have everything backed up on my time machine so I’ll just wipe and restore when I dig up the Leopard install DVD.
I almost don’t want to post the icon of this page but I think it deserves to be shown so you know to associate this logo with MacMurder…
Update: I called up applecare who told me of another little keyboard shortcut for startup - the ALT a.k.a Option key. This asked for my firmware password then allowed me to select the Leopard install disk. From there you can select Utilities > Restore System From Backup and use your Time Machine to restore the system completely.
It’s going to take a while (3 and half hours) but at least it will be restored! No idea why on my particular issue, none of the other startup key commands would work.
