For the past couple of weeks, I've been avoiding writing Word documents or opening up Excel spreadsheets as my installation of Office had mysteriously died. I took the time out on the weekend to prepare my laptop for a full reinstall, since I figured the machine was getting massively hosed from all the different things I've been trying out on it.

I ended up not doing the reinstall, as I kind of wanted to put an encrypted home directory (I fear the Government) on the machine, which would mean archiving off my iPhoto library, which would mean spending US$25 on a tool to do that. All of which was a bit much for a Sunday afternoon. So, I stuck with the suboptimal install on the machine.

It's lucky I actually did that, since I finally got sick of the problem, and googled myself a solution. It turns out, the problem lies with updating the prebinding. Basically, prebinding is a performance hack used to make dynamic libraries not so dynamic, and is generally a very good thing. Unfortunately, a number of Java dynamic libraries (from older versions it seems) were breaking the prebinding, so the whole prebinding operation was failing, resulting in our lovely Rosetta applications failing too.

The fact that I can actually go in to the console, play around with prebindings, and fix my computer when it stops working optimally is one of the reasons I love using Mac OS X. It's like the best Linux ever.