About the General Controls Patch

©1995 by James W. Walker

OtherMenu externals allow a rather unusual maneuver: Opening a directory dialog while another directory dialog is still open.  For example, perhaps you select Save in some application, and then decide to delete some files with the Delete external in order to make more room for the file you want to save.  The General Controls control panel (from System 7.5 up to 8.6) conflicts with this procedure.  I can’t fix it by changing OtherMenu, so I am providing a way to fix it by patching General Controls.  The patch is not needed for Mac OS 9.0.

The severity of this conflict seems to vary.  On my PowerMac, it caused a bus error, but on my PowerBook 150 it caused freezes and damaged the directory structure on my hard disk.  In some cases, the conflict may be masked by other extensions that modify directory dialogs and load after General Controls, but you shouldn’t count on that.

Before you install the patch, it might be a good idea to restart with minimal extensions.  If you mistrust me,  you might want to save a copy of General Controls somewhere outside of your System Folder.

To install the patch, just double-click the little patcher application.  It will automatically locate the General Controls panel in your Control Panels folder, patch it, and display a dialog telling you that it is done.  After patching, a “p” will be appended to the version number.  But if you checked the version before, Finder will probably not show you the change immediately.