I wrote a little shell script to run in BBEdit. It creates a uniquely named text file containing the names of all/most of the files in my system library folder. It uses the ls command with the -AR option to recursively list subdirectories encountered. I call it CatSysLib.sh:
#!/bin/sh
cd /System/Library
theDate=`date '+%y%m%d%H%M%S'`
destPath="/Volumes/Cornucopia/Catalogs"
theCat="$destPath/$theDate.txt"
ls -AR > $theCat
exit 0
By comparing the new system with the old one that didn’t work, I discovered an odd extention: LexarFilterScheme.kext.
A Google search revealed that THIS was the cause of my DVD not playing commercial titles, to wit:
“One of our readers, has reported to us an incompatibility issue rather annoying between the Secure II software found in USB key from Lexar and MacOSX. Indeed, once the software is installed on the Mac, it becomes absolutely impossible to play any DVD (backup or movie DVD).”
I made sure not to reinstall that security software and used Disk Utility to reformat the flash memory of the Lexar JumpDrive.
Note: In the script above, the first line starts with a two character “shebang” which is a word formed from a corrupted combination of the number sign (hash) and the exclamation point (bang), kind of like the word “blog” is from web log.
MacEnable 