This is an excerpt from MacWorld Mac Secrets, 5th Edition by David Pogue and Joseph Schorr:
At Ease and the death of your hard drive
The manual tells you that before removing At Ease, you must open the At Ease
control panel and click the Off button. It specifically warns you not to drag the At
Ease files to the Trash. The manual doesn’t, however, specify exactly what will
happen if you don’t remove At Ease in the officially sanctioned manner:
Basically, you trash your hard drive.
At Ease does something rather un-kosher when it installs itself—it modifies the
boot blocks of your hard drive (the very first instructions that get processed
when the Mac is turned on) to ignore the Finder and launch At Ease instead. Of
course, if you’ve thrown away At Ease, the Mac goes on a wild-goose chase, and
throws up its electronic hands in frustration. It gives you a flickering system bomb
icon in an empty dialog box—and, after a while, the blinking question-mark Icon of Doom.
Sometimes, running the Disk Tools program can repair the damage. Other times,
doing a clean system reinstall (see Chapter 36) does the trick.
Much better, though, to avoid the problem in the first place: Turn off At Ease
before removing any of its components, or remove it using its original Installer
program’s Remove option.
The forgotten-At-Ease-password trick
It could happen to you: You forget your own At Ease password. Holding down the
Shift key at startup, of course, doesn’t bypass At Ease. How can you get back to
your Finder?
Restart the Mac from your Disk Tools disk or your system software CD-ROM. Now
just open your hard drive’s System Folder, open the Preferences folder, and throw
away At Ease Preferences. Now At Ease can’t remember your password, either!
Restart the Mac and you’re back in business.
But, on the other hand, you can't get into the Finder or its Control Panel in order to turn off At Ease. So I hope you have a copy of the System 7.x Disk Tools disk and a full copy of At Ease on you.
I hope this helps.
73s de Phreakout.
At Ease and the death of your hard drive
The manual tells you that before removing At Ease, you must open the At Ease
control panel and click the Off button. It specifically warns you not to drag the At
Ease files to the Trash. The manual doesn’t, however, specify exactly what will
happen if you don’t remove At Ease in the officially sanctioned manner:
Basically, you trash your hard drive.
At Ease does something rather un-kosher when it installs itself—it modifies the
boot blocks of your hard drive (the very first instructions that get processed
when the Mac is turned on) to ignore the Finder and launch At Ease instead. Of
course, if you’ve thrown away At Ease, the Mac goes on a wild-goose chase, and
throws up its electronic hands in frustration. It gives you a flickering system bomb
icon in an empty dialog box—and, after a while, the blinking question-mark Icon of Doom.
Sometimes, running the Disk Tools program can repair the damage. Other times,
doing a clean system reinstall (see Chapter 36) does the trick.
Much better, though, to avoid the problem in the first place: Turn off At Ease
before removing any of its components, or remove it using its original Installer
program’s Remove option.
The forgotten-At-Ease-password trick
It could happen to you: You forget your own At Ease password. Holding down the
Shift key at startup, of course, doesn’t bypass At Ease. How can you get back to
your Finder?
Restart the Mac from your Disk Tools disk or your system software CD-ROM. Now
just open your hard drive’s System Folder, open the Preferences folder, and throw
away At Ease Preferences. Now At Ease can’t remember your password, either!
Restart the Mac and you’re back in business.
But, on the other hand, you can't get into the Finder or its Control Panel in order to turn off At Ease. So I hope you have a copy of the System 7.x Disk Tools disk and a full copy of At Ease on you.
I hope this helps.
73s de Phreakout.