I was attracted by T-Mobile’s new £15/month offer (first three months £10) with the new Mobile Broadband USB Stick 620 (capable of HSDPA 7.2). The box clearly states “Mac OS X v10.4.x or above”. However, when I installed the supplied software on my nice new Macbook Pro (which came with Snow Leopard, that is v10.6, installed) my system was rendered unusable on the next reboot. I am extremely grateful to David Glover for his workaround.

To get my machine back I had to …

1) boot in firewire target mode (hold down T while powering up)
2) attach to another Mac using a firewire cable
3) download the libcurl.4.dylib archive from David Glover’s post
4) install the above file in usr/lib/libcurl.4.dylib on the target machine
5) unmount the target machine
6) boot the target machine normally (it works)

But to get the T-Mobile broadband to work again I had to …

1) save a copy of the “good” libcurl.4.dylib
2) run /Applications/T-Mobile Mobile Broadband Manager/Uninstall_T-Mobile Mobile Broadband Manager.app
3) insert the USB stick
4) run the installer from there (I had previously used the CDROM that came with the stick)
5) copy the “good” libcurl.4.dylib back into /usr/lib
6) restart T-Mobile Mobile Broadband Manager

I have a call outstanding with T-Mobile (who were unaware of the problem), and will post an update as and when the fix the problem. It is astonishing that third party software should overwrite vital system files! As of now I don’t know what else they’ve broken, although I was alarmed to find other files in /usr/lib with the same timestamp …

$ ls -l /usr/lib/ | grep Feb
-rwxr-xr-x    1 pgdh  staff    163616 27 Feb  2009 bkLib.dylib
-rwxr-xr-x    1 pgdh  staff    179412 27 Feb  2009 libAgent.dylib
-rwxr-xr-x    1 pgdh  staff    208640 27 Feb  2009 libTinyXml.dylib
-rwxr-xr-x    1 pgdh  staff    522284 27 Feb  2009 libcurl.4.dylib.broken
-rwxr-xr-x    1 pgdh  staff     25464 27 Feb  2009 libmd5.dylib
$

More news as it happens.