Terminal command to id extensions loading?
 

I was talking to an Apple tech earlier today who had me type it into terminal to find out what was making Quickbooks crash in every situation outside of safeboot. It had the word "grep" in it, I know...and it returned a result that was a mere two lines, one of which was the driver for my Sonnet SATA card, the other was something the Apple rep said he's had in his system forever so should therefore be considered harmless. (The tech said that normally he wouldnt' be giving me that level or kind of support on this issue, and mentioned these forums as the source of his knowledge.)

I trashed everything having anything to do with the Sonnet driver, did so on the phone with Sonnnet...killed Quickbooks pllist files and reinstalled, etc.... Quickbooks still crashes before it opens, so I want to run that command again to see what it says.

Thanks so much!

The command to see what extensions are active is:

kextstat

To filter the output so that only non-Apple extensions show up, you could pipe the results of that command to grep and tell it to ignore lines containing the string "com.apple":

kextstat | grep -v "com.apple"

Earlier today? Well... there's always:

history

;)

and in this case, even:

history | grep grep

:)

Also looking in ~/Library/CrashReporter (where ~ = the user's home directory) for the QuickBooks crash log may give some clues as to the problem. It could be posted here for us to look at.

Thank you all for your help. The only other item listed was:
at.obdev.KUC

Research told me nothing definitive, except that it might be related to software that I know I've been running successfully for months from Objective Development Software. And I couldn't find any visible files to remove that seemed related in any case!

I also did as bramley suggested, and I guess Quickbooks is crashing so fast (it only tries to open for the blink of an eye- I wouldn't think it was doing anything, except I see it pop up on Drag Thing's running apps dock for a split second) that Crashreporter isnt' registering anything, because the last modified date for the QB log is 10/06.

The only bright spot in all this is the possibility that it is NOT the Sonnet drivers causing the problem, meaning I won't have to re-do my whole hard drive set up. But if it isn't that, I'm at an absolute loss!

Please indicate which version of Mac OS X you are using.

Also do any messages appear in system.log or console.log when the application crashes? If so what are they?

Use Console.app (/Applications/Utilities/) to view the logs. Note the messages are timestamped to make it easy to see which messages are relevant.

Also have you tried creating a fresh user (for test purposes) and confirming that Quickbooks does not work when logged in as that user?

Yes, I've been the fresh user, that's how I made my way to safe boot...process of elimination.

I have now used the uninstaller for Little Snitch and that didn't change anything.

I have checked the logs, and I tried opening QB to see what came up, and the console log says this every time QB opensandcloses:

RegisterProcess failed (error = -2805)

The system log doesn't register anything.

Does that help?

I would have said that it is extremely unlikely that hardware (and or its drivers) would cause a failure in the one application only. i.e only when you've eliminated all other possibilities would I consider the card to be the problem.

The reason for asking about which version of Mac OS X you are using is because Safe Boot does different things depending on which version you are using.

Creating a fresh test user is a simple way to check whether the problem is local to a user or a system problem.

The error message implies that there is a problem with registering the application. How did you register the application originally? Have you tried re-registering?

I can't register the program when it won't open.

I suppose I could safe boot re-reg. I'll try that. It's easier than re-installing my system.

I am up to date with my system.