Dear Apple

Mac OS X 10.7.3 Update Problems, CUI Errors, Stuck Installs, and Crashes: Mac OS X 10.7.3 update was just released, and for the vast majority of users the update installed trouble free. But not everyone was so lucky, and a series of problems have cropped up for some users, ranging from being stuck on an endless spinning loop progress indicator, to apps crashing nonstop, to a very bizarre “CUI CUI CUI” error screen filled with question marks, to other strange behavior.

Thankfully I was spared of the troubles so far, but anyway. From what I’ve read, installing OS X 10.7.3 Combo update should help. If you can get to your desktop at all…

If you can’t get to the desktop of the Mac in question, you can boot it with Target Disk Mode (Firewire or Thunderbolt required), and then point the 10.7.3 Combo Update at the troubled Mac and install it that way. If your OS X installation is totally screwed up and you can’t use target disk mode, you have a few choices:

1. Restore from a recent pre-10.7.3 Time Machine backup, then install the Combo Updater
2. Boot from Recovery HD, a Recovery Drive, or Lion USB drive, and reinstall everything

Not the best situation, but hopefully you have recent Time Machine backups.

Yes I do, on one computer. I have a couple of Macs that weren’t upgraded yet, and now I am sure I even want to bother. But the fun is just about to start. According to this TUAW report, you can’t actually use Safari to download the update.

Safari users seeing random ‘404 not found’ on valid support.apple.com pages: For the past few weeks, I have run into a problem with links to Apple.com coming up 404 “not found.” Specifically, these have all been links to pages on http://support.apple.com/. For example, this morning I did a Google search for 10.7.3 combo. One of the first results was a link to http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1484 which came up 404.

So it boils down to this: If you are the unlucky and you can’t use your computer because of the bug in the latest Apple OS X, don’t give up. It is simple, just first you have to do some weird stuff to boot it up. Then use any non-Apple browser to download the combo update again, because for some reason the bugs in Apple Safari will prevent you from accessing the Apple website…

And yes, my updates went fine so far, but if this isn’t a sign that “times are a-changing” then I don’t know what is.

via osxdaily, tuaw