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That's pretty amazing considering that the behaviour that causes the bug is not something unusual or rare.

I doubt that many OS X users even know they can enable a guest account.

isn't it enabled by default? I know that disabling Guest is one of the first things I do to a new Mac/PC/Linux machine.

No, it's disabled by default - at least in Snow Leopard.

The key question then is what happens if you had enabled it in Leopard and then you install Snow Leopard as an in-place upgrade.

It looks like Apple meant to have the setting revert, so that guest logins had to be reenabled. Instead, you let your friend login to the (still-enabled) guest account and then...

No, guest login is disabled by default.

There's some indication that you needed to enable the guest account in Leopard (it's disabled by default) then upgrade to a developer seed, and then to the retail Snow Leopard.

If true, that would explain why is wasn't caught sooner. If true, you could test the final build of Snow Leopard all day (and the upgrade path from Leopard) and not catch it.

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