In addition to the 10.7.3 Update for Lion, Apple also released a security update for Snow Leopard. Fixing many of the same issues, it also had an unfortunate side-effect: Rosetta based apps stopped working.
Almost immediately, the support forums were filled with messages from people who found themselves unable to run programs like Quicken 2007 and AppleWorks 6. According to reports, the problem was sometimes limited to file access operations, but in some cases you couldn’t even start the program or it would crash on exit.
Despite the various complaints and accusations, this was not an attempt by Apple to get people to stop using Power-PC applications. They would have given plenty of notice if this was their intent (although, as I noted in a previous article, plenty of notice was given about the lack of Rosetta support in Lion, yet a large majority of people still didn’t know about it until it was too late.)
Within a few days, Apple released update 2012-001 v1.1, which has replaced the original patch. If you already applied the patch from last Wednesday, go back to Software Update and download the 1.1 version. If you have not yet applied the original, then you only need to download the 1.1 update and you’re all set. The 1.1 update removes the component that was causing Rosetta applications so much trouble.