A faculty user came to me having downloaded a Shockwave game called "What Is". The game itself would run fine, but the accompanying "Setup" program that goes with it (to enter the questions and answers) would fail on launch with an error about the Xtra (text) extension being missing:
"This application requires an Xtra (text/Flash movie) that either does not exist or failed to initialize properly. Please make sure the appropriate Xtras are in the Xtras folder"
I spent far too long solving this problem, but eventually figured it out. And, of course, it has to do with the ancient code from Macromedia Director that was used by the program's author to create the game. I spun my wheels for a long time thinking it was a versioning problem, or some cache files on her machine, or a bad font, etc. The game would run fine on my computer and other Macs when AirDropped over. It was perplexing. The problem persisted in a test user created on her machine, indicating that it was a system-wide problem, not a problem specific to her user.
The solution: Turns out she was a foreign language teacher and she had renamed her "Macintosh HD" to a word with a caret mark (^) and this was somehow breaking the Shockwave game from being able to find the Xtras folder (/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Shockwave 12).
Gah! So simple, yet so perplexing. Hope this helps someone else. Google didn't help at all; the Adobe boards are full of Windows users complaining about Shockwave.
