OS X Mountain Lion breaks everything

Perhaps a bit dramatic on the “breaking”-part – OS X Mountain Lion has some really awesome features, but only lasted 2 days on my laptop.

I love being on the bleeding edge of technology, and boy did I bleed this time. In the past I had no issue, running an OS X Developer Preview on my MacBook Pro as the primary OS. Having had no issues with OS X Lion, I thought the cougar variant would be no worse.

Installation went quick once the 4,5GB download was there and the new features of iMessage, cloud services and the welcome arrival of entering search text into the Safari URL field were welcome additions to an otherwise already great OS.

The first alarm bell went off, when Little Snitch refused to work – this was okay and did not bother me too much. More alarming was VMWare’s (as well as VirtualBox and Parallels) refusal to run. Sadly I had to do a restore from my previous backup and a reinstall of OS X Lion.

The OS X Lion reinstall took about 30 minutes on my SSD drive and the restore from TimeMachine another 2 hours. VMWare started and Little Snitch was happy – just a tiny problem – neither OS X Mail or iChat wanted to start.

TimeMachine must have backed up libraries from my OS X Mountain Lion install and then restored those onto OS X Lion, rendering some applications useless. Even reinstalling the latest combo-update denied me success.

Eventually I used Pacifist and restored the iLifeMediaBrowser.framework as libraries within it were reported incompatible (yes, I did try and reinstall iLife which also did not work) and this fixed the problem at last.