Unfortunately, I don't have a good answer for you. It's obviously a
problem with dynamic loading. VisIt has a bazillion shared libraries
that it loads when launching. I can say that we often run on 10.5.8
systems, so I don't know what the issue might be. However, it's going
to be much more complex than we can get into in time for the class. I
apologize.
I would recommend sending a message to the visit-users mailing list
(
https://email.ornl.gov/mailman/listinfo/visit-users) and iterate with
the main developers.
Sorry I couldn't give more help.
-Sean