Why would a Standard Projector call for Shockwave

Question

I have 30 titles authored in Director and updated to Dir. 10.5.9.  I have both Mac and Windows versions.  In 20 yrs. I have never put any shockwave content into any of these programs.  Yet, suddenly, I shipped CDs to two Mac customers who both have the same problem.
I included Standard projectors in all the CDs, tested them on our Snow Leopard, Lion, and Mountain Lion.  Both customers have either Lion or Mountain lion on their Macs.  Yet, when they loaded the programs and double clicked on the projector, an error message came up saying the program was unable to find Shockwave. ???  That has not happened in 20 years of selling and upgrading these programs.  And it still isn't happening on our Macs with the same OS.  Yet two of our latest customers both have that problem.
Even more mysterious is that one of the customers downloaded Shockwave 12 and it wouldn't work, so she found a place to download Shockwave 11 and her programs startted working.  Yet, theyi are not shockwave programs or projectors.  They shouldn't need Shockwave at all.
Has anyone ever heard of that happening before?  Can someone offer some suggestions of what I might try to fix it?  Since there is no shockwave content in the programs or the projectors, I don't even know where to start.
Thanks in advance for anything that anyone might be able to offer.
Dewey

Answer 1

Hello Dewey,
I’ve been having the same problems here, and it’s difficult to fix, as I can’t duplicate the problem on any of my development Macs.
My Mac programs work (working on many different computers) they are not corrupt – but on some of my clients Macs they kick off this strage ‘download shockwave’ bug…
This needs more testing!!!!
If you are embedding your xtras inside the projector – this might help.
Try removing all embedded xtras?
Under the publish setting – EXCLUDE ALL XTRAS
Place all the xtras in an ‘Xtras’ folder inside the programs root folder. (like in the old days)
Although I have had this fix the issue on some of my customers computers - it has not fixed it for all?
I’m only guessing here, but maybe this is caused by ‘Gatekeeper’ or another restricted user setting that I have not been able to find???
I have seen corrupt projectors ask to download shockwave before – both on windows and Mac – from as far back as D7.  It seems to be some crazy last ditch effort to access the xtras needed to make the program work????
Some of the xtras bomb out in the temp folder, (maybe they don’t work anymore, or maybe they are being blocked by gatekeeper etc..) so the projector goes looking for them in the shockwave folder – it can’t find them all, so it asks to download shockwave – but downloading shockwave 12 does not find the right xtras – so the projector gets stuck and asks the download shockwave again – but if the projector was able to download shockwave 11 then the projector finds the right (missing) xtras and works.
Director help file says :-
“Xtra extensions stored in a projector must be uncompressed to a separate file each time the projector starts up, which makes startup slower. If the Xtra extensions are stored in an external directory, the projector starts more quickly”
These separate uncompressed xtars get placed into the apples temp folder somewhere – and this is where I believe the problem starts.
Also something that might be related -
I have also been having problems with the embedded fonts - which also end up in the same temp folder.
I have to test that all the fonts are active before I continue running the program – if they are not all active I restart the program again and again – sometimes up to 5 restarts before all the fonts work?
All quite crazy.
I hope this helps a little bit - I also would really love to know how to fix this crazy problem.
Milky.