Crash issues with IDL on Mac Lion

IDL 8.1 is known to have some problems when installed on Lion (and possibly some installs of Snow Leopard). This is a known issue that has to do with some of the libraries distributed with IDL (specifically libcurl).

On a fresh, new install of IDL 8.1 on any version of Lion, starting the binary causes crashes, almost immediately on start. It is totally unrelated to any licensing problem and will crash even if a dialog box is present on the screen.

IDL's version of libcurl libraries does not play well with other libcurl versions that are now used and installed by Tiger.

Open terminal:

For most installations:

cd /Applications/itt/idl/idl81/bin/bin.darwin.x86_64

If the user installed IDL in their home directory:

cd ~/Applications/itt/idl/idl81/bin/bin.darwin.x86_64

Then rename these files:

sudo mv ./libcurl.4.0.1.dylib libcurl.4.0.1.dylib.bak
sudo mv ./libcurl.4.dylib libcurl.4.dylib.bak
sudo mv ./libcurl.dylib libcurl.dylib.bak

(Sudo will not be needed if doing this from a privileged account.)

Exelis has more detailed information on this known problem in their support forums.