03-24-2012, 01:32 PM

Hi All,

Hopefully you can help me out with this, because I'm near wits end with this.

I have had Lion since the day it came out, and this is the first time I've encountered this problem. All of the applications that I have downloaded and installed before yesterday worked perfectly. Then, out of the blue, any application that I install or update (not from the App store) refuses to launch. It either bounces forever in the dock or does nothing when it is clicked.

The only system changes I have made are installing Photoshop CS6 Beta and Steam. So far, I've tried:
- Permissions & Disk repair through the Lion recovery partition
- Removing and re-downloading the apps
- Running in 32-Bit mode

I'm running 10.7.3, with all the latest updates installed, on a mid-2011 Macbook Pro. Any help in the matter would be greatly appreciated, as I'm tearing my hair out over this. Restoring from a TM backup is not really a viable option currently, since my backup drive is 50 miles away and unavailable for the next week and a half (yes, I know... stupid me...)

Thanks again,
-Eric

03-24-2012, 02:40 PM

It sounds like you may have encountered some corruption with your user account. Let's try this to see if that's true:

Create another user account and give it Admin permissions. Call it whatever you wish. Log on to the new account and download some of those apps again. See if they work OK with the new account. Let us know the result.

03-24-2012, 02:47 PM

Thanks a bunch for your reply. However, I may have stumbled upon a solution (of sorts) from another suggestion. I should have started by seeing what was going on in my Console. Searching for an error that provided led me to a problem with the Lion quarantine system. I've outlined the steps I took that solved it for me: (Less.app is my example)

In Terminal, I changed directories to the following:

Replace everything except for Contents/MacOS with the location of your application.

$:  cd /Users/ericskram/Desktop/Less.app/Contents/MacOS

List the files in the directory using ls. There should just be one. In my case, it was named less.

$: xattr less

There should be an entry labeled com.apple.quarantine. If there is, use the following command to remove it.

$: xattr -d com.apple.quarantine less

Restart the system and it should work... at least it did for me.

Source: Workarounds for quarantine bug in OS X Lion | MacFixIt - CNET Reviews