FireWire extensions cause startup crashes after installing Epson updates

Regarding our report last time about startup crashes after installing the Epson Stylus Driver Updater 1.1AES, there was a consensus that the cause is the FireWire extensions installed by the Updater. There are 4 extensions in question: FireWire Enabler (v 2.1), FireWire Support (v 2.1), Epson FWPrintDriver Epson, and FWPrintExpert Epson FWPrintFamily. However, the actual culprits are the 2.1 versions of FireWire Enabler and FireWire Support. These are incompatible with Mac OS 9.0.4, which installs 2.3.3 versions of these files. The solution is to delete these extensions and (if desired) replacing them with the ones installed by Mac OS 9.0.4 (if you don't have back-ups of these files, you can use TomeViewer to extract them from the Update tome file). Apparently, the Epson Updater will not overwrite existing 2.3.3 files with the older 2.1 versions, but will install them on Macs that do not presently have any FireWire extensions installed/enabled, for whatever reason This is thus especially likely to be a problem with Macs that do not have FireWire ports and therefore did not get these extensions installed by the Mac OS 9.0.4 Update. Interestingly, these FireWire extensions will load, and thus trigger the crash on affected Macs, even when starting up with extensions disabled (by holding down the Shift key at startup). Thus, you will have to startup from a bootable CD (or similar alternative startup disk) to access the drive and replace the offending extensions. Other readers suggested other possible culprits, including Norton AntiVirus (Graham Haultain), ACTION WYSIWYG (Tony Paradowski) and Epson USBPrintClassX drivers (Jim Stocking), but we suspect these FireWire files are the cause in almost all cases. Epson Stylus Color 900 6.3AE is the latest driver software for the Epson 900 series inkjet printers. If you install this, you do not need to also install the recently released Epson Stylus Driver Updater 1.1AES (see also this item). The Read Me file for this 900 update makes reference to an ability to connect to a Mac via the FireWire port (as well as serial, USB or Ethernet). As such, it also installs the same outdated FireWire extensions mentioned above and will also therefore potentially lead to a startup crash. Again, the solution is to remove and/or replace the offending extensions. (Thanks, Robert Stransky, Robert Shull, Derek Jacobs, Damian Grabowski, Bob Clark, Chess Edwards and others.)