Am I Blog Enough For You?

I struggled mightily with this issue trying to get WebEx to work, so I’m posting my solution on my blog.

The error is “Failed to load GPC extension” when trying to attend a WebEx meeting. I could only find one other post on the whole Internet with this issue and it was unsolved since 2003.

Anyway, the reason I was getting this error was because I had named my hard drive “☯” (the Unicode character for Yin Yang). The solution was the manually uninstall everything (instructions below), reboot, change the name of my hard drive to something boring like “Todd,” and then try again.

Here are the instructions for manually removing WebEx:

a. Open up your MacHD –> User Folder –> Library –> Application Support
Trash the WebEx Folder
b. Go back to your User Folder –> Library –> Internet-Plugins
Trash the WebEx-Plugins Folder
c. Go back to your User Folder –> Library –> Preferences
Trash all WebEx Preference files (3-6 possible prefs)
d. Open up your MacHD  –> Applications –> Java  –> J2SE 5.0 –> Java Preferences
Click on Delete Files under Temporary Internet Files and delete all all Temp Files.
e. Open up your MacHD –> Applications –> Utilities –> Terminal
type: rm -rf .webex (return)
type exit (return)
f. Empty Trash (not all items may be removed, if not empty trash again after reboot)
g. Reboot system

My theory is that the Meeting Manager installer and program both can’t handle file paths with Unicode/non-ascii characters in them. When I turned on debugging and looked in console I saw pointer problems in both Safari and Firefox:

11/17/08 4:13:24 PM [0x0-0x1f01f].com.apple.Safari[240] Destroy
11/17/08 4:13:24 PM [0x0-0x1f01f].com.apple.Safari[240] Safari(240,0xa0477fa0) malloc: *** error for object 0xec32c8: pointer being freed was not allocated
11/17/08 4:13:45 PM [0x0-0x1d01d].org.mozilla.firefox[234] plugin,NP_Initialize start
11/17/08 4:13:45 PM [0x0-0x1d01d].org.mozilla.firefox[234] plugin,NP_Initialize end
11/17/08 4:13:45 PM [0x0-0x1d01d].org.mozilla.firefox[234] plugin,NP_GetEntryPoints start
11/17/08 4:13:45 PM [0x0-0x1d01d].org.mozilla.firefox[234] plugin,NP_GetEntryPoints end
11/17/08 4:14:15 PM [0x0-0x1d01d].org.mozilla.firefox[234] Destroy
11/17/08 4:14:15 PM [0x0-0x1d01d].org.mozilla.firefox[234] firefox-bin(234,0xa0477fa0) malloc: *** error for object 0×26532c8: Non-aligned pointer being freed
11/17/08 4:14:15 PM [0x0-0x1d01d].org.mozilla.firefox[234] *** set a breakpoint in malloc_error_break to debug
11/17/08 4:14:15 PM [0x0-0x1d01d].org.mozilla.firefox[234] NP_Shutdown

I hope this helps someone else out there who runs into this.

[Update: I tried to send this info to WebEx support and got this in return:

Thank you for trying to contact WebEx Support, but your request could not be accepted for one of the following reasons:
- There was no open case number in the subject line,
- The case number in the subject line refers to a case that is closed,
- Or the case number is invalid.

]