My sister desperately called me last night (during dinner, no less) complaining that her iMac G5 kept crashing while running World Book Encyclopaedia. She had a project due today for one of her classes and needed the application to do some research. I asked her what was happening, and she said she kept getting the ‘friendly’ kernel panic screen. You know, the one asking you to hold down the power button in four different languages:

I told her to restart her computer and I SSH’d in to take a look at some logs and the stack trace. Turns out a module (no doubt named in Russian) was to blame. The module, KFC_Update_Lib, kept paging for a resource, died, and took the system down with it. I called the very helpful folks at Software MacKiev and they told me the module had to do with the Update mechanism built into the application, and that misconfigured Internet settings were likely to blame. I didn’t see anything unusual, so I deleted some preference files, relaunched the application and it functioned just fine.

She finished her project and the KFC module no longer caused the system to ‘colonel panic’. All’s well that ends well, I say.