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Not A Great Start...
17 November 2015
After downloading and installing today's update to Lightroom, we were greated with this error message:
On Launch. An error occurred when attempting to change modules.
We had updated from the previous release (with all the problems) on this particular MacBook Pro. We are running the last stable release on another laptop.
Our catalog never did appear. And we weren't able to help it by selecting the current catalog either.
Worse, we once again found our hard drive's root directory infected with a file named RTCommmon.db, which wasn't there before we launched Lightroom. Adobe shouldn't be writing any files there, of course. We've asked Product Manager Sharad Mangalick about that.
We've been trying all sorts of incantations for the last hours but have been unable to even just view our catalog. Which makes this update worse than the last one.
RESOLVING ONE ISSUE
Update (17 Nov.): We had performed the update using the Help > Updates menu item, which seemed like the smartest approach. Apparently it was the problem.
Exploring the error message online led to a number of goose chases. Suffice to say our various permissions were fine and our Lightroom Preferences and Catalog files were fine, too.
So we uninstalled Lightroom 6.3.
Next, we downloaded the 6.3 installer from the link in our earlier story today. That, however, failed to install. It reported it was "not applicable" to our installation.
So we downloaded version 6.1.1 from the Lightroom downloads page only to get the same error.
As far as we know, those updaters should work with either the perpetual license or the Creative Cloud subscription. We have both, too.
So we launched Creative Cloud (which itself required an update) and installed Lightroom 6.3 from there. And we're back in business.
Except for that rude RTCommon.db issue. The 3K file is an SQLite database (which is what Lightroom uses for its Catalog) with a "create table" command embedded in it. Harmless no doubt but it just shouldn't be there.
RESOLVING THE OTHER
Update (23 Nov.): Mangalick replied promptly to our query about RTCommmon.db. "I checked our codebase and we're not using RTCommon.db, so I'm not quite clear on where this is coming from. Since we don't have this referenced in our codebase at all, its not coming from us."
That puzzled us because we watched the file being created as Lightroom 6.3 loaded and Activity Monitor didn't show any other application tapping into the CPU. And launching no other application caused the file to be created.
So we copied v6.3 to another system and launched it there. On that system the very same binary did not create RTCommmon.db.
Hmmm. We copied v6.1.1 to the problem machine and launched it. True to form, it did not create RTCommmon.db.
Desperate times call for wild guesses. We simply reinstalled OS 10.10.5 on the problem machine. And when we next launched v6.3, it did not create RTCommmon.db.
We vaguely recall a recent update (was it 10.10.5 itself?) which left a lot of folders in the root directory (which are usually cleaned up on restart). We manually deleted them from both machines. Perhaps the culprit was that update.