Tracking Down Snow Leopard’s Apple Events Bug
When Snow Leopard assigns FFFF (-1) as the Apple event’s return ID, it takes this as an invitation to increase the return ID again. So the Apple event goes out with a return ID -1, but the reply comes back with the next return ID in the sequence, which is 0. The two return IDs don’t match! Thus, the reply can’t be associated with the original Apple event. So the sender thinks that no reply has ever come back—and, after waiting for a while, gives up and generates the “timed out” error.
