Apple have definitely gone Vista with Leopard. 10.5.2 continues to be plagued with bugs both new and unresolved from 10.5 and 10.5.1

The best is that the 10.5.2 installation completely bricked my Intel Mac mini. Can't even boot it - it just restarts every minute or so while on the initial grey spinner boot screen.

Installation on my PowerBook first wouldn't go because of permissions issues (caused by previous versions). Once that was fixed update went off without any reported errors. Restart showed 10.5.1 was still running. No sight of 10.5.2. However some prefs, including third-party enabler for two-finger scrolling had been disabled along with Safari plugin Stand.

In the morning I'll do a new complete backup of this system before trying to apply the combo updater I just downloaded.

From everything I've heard on various podcasts, fresh installs are the way to go with Leopard.

But hell, what do I know about OSX?

You can't fresh install an update... The original 10.5 install was done fresh. I never update from previous OS versions.

I just got a new/refurb MacBook 2.2 GHz last Friday that was a complete headache for a couple days. The system was unstable out of the box. Right off the bat the keyboard viewer, found in the International Preference Panel was missing. I looked everywhere. Come to find out that this is a known problem. http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=307354

Besides that, about 2/3 of the time when I restarted the computer, it would log out, shut the screen off, then freeze. I'd have to hold the power button down to reset it.

The system log was full of errors with stray processes; NTP started making adjustments to the system clock ever 10-15 minutes in jumps of ±.2 -1.2 seconds; apps crashing left and right.

I finally decided to start from square one, since I'd never had this much trouble with a Mac before. I tried my Leopard install disk that I had purchased to no avail; this MacBook revision came about a month after 10.5. So I had to use the install disk that came with the machine.

Long story short, after an erase and install, my MacBook is much more stable- no trouble at all so far.

I'm still looking for a way to get rid of "Relative Dates" in the Finder. Does anyone out there know of a way to completely disable Relative Dates? The just keep coming back.

I was really hoping that 10.52 was going to help…

-Randy

I probably cursed myself in the last post about Leopard, because shortly after that, I started getting issues as well. Most were around .Mac though, something I haven't used till recently. I bought the family pack so that my mom and sister can upload photos easily, and I figured I'd use it for the syncing. So far, while the syncs work, I get random times where Sync Server hits 100% CPU usage of a core. I've also had problems shutting down, where the OS just hangs with the spinning cursor. This even happened today before I left for work, and as an experiment, I left the system alone. Got home 8 hours later, system was still on. Kinda ironic that their paid .Mac service would expose so many problems in the OS, but hey, paid services aren't all they have cracked up to be, as Microsoft knows too.

So far, 10.5.2 has installed fine on 3 machines, but I haven't lived with it long enough to see if it fixes my specific issues.I do already know I want the old network share icons back, because the little people holding hands just doesn't convey NAS disk to me.

Overall I still wouldn't say Apple's gone Vista with Leopard. I think they have a bit more to fall before that can be said. The only thing keeping my Vista box at work safe and not thrown through a window is the fact that it sits there idle most of the time while I get work done on the XP and Leopard boxes. I tried using it for a while as a main machine, and it just proved too unwieldy. Even after a year of updates, it's still slow copying files off the network, still gets horribly sluggish on a box with decent specs, and still has explorer freak outs where it hangs till I end the process.

As usual, my face is red. Wow. I need to read more carefully.

This does bring up an annoyance of mine. Windows service packs can be easily slipstreamed into a new CD, so that a new install of XP has SP2 right off the bat. While Apple does refresh retail discs from time to time, they don't offer a similar slipstream process. I'd like to be able to make a recovery disk usable for doing clean installs with the 10.x.x updates already included, instead of having to slap down a 10.x.0 install and combo update it.

The only booting issue I had was that my old hardware was desupported; I have been (legitimately) running Leopard for well over a year now. I have, however, seen a number of issues, but very few of them have survived past day 0 (10/26/07)

The ones that have are bluetooth and x11 related.

While you don't have explicit "slipstream" support, you could make a Time Machine backup of a "clean" system with all the bits and pieces that you might ever want, and then do a Time Machine restore from that onto fresh systems. At that point, you only have to go through and reset the machine-specific settings (e.g., network configuration).

So 10.5.2 didn't fix the Sync Server issue, but I found out the cause. I've basically kept the same Address Book data now from 10.1 and across multiple machines. I've used 3rd party sync tools with it when I've had multiple machines, and countless apps have integrated and touched the files at some point. And it seems adding .Mac sync in pushed it over the edge. In ~/Library/Application Support/Address Book/, the main database file was ~25 megs. I found that you can delete all files in that folder, except the Images, Metadata, and MailRecents files/folders with no harm. When Address Book was relaunched, it rebuilt the database and was a small 350k file. .Mac syncs then ran quickly, and with little CPU interruption.

Whatever breaking point I crossed started manifesting as crashes after a little bit in any app that touched the database. Skype, Safari, Adium and others were crashing, and when I looked at the crash logs, the addressbook framework was what caused it.

Things like this really make me think Apple needs to add some sort of checker to the system to purge out of control databases. I've had wonky Mail issues over the years due to similar issues. It would make cleaning up problems like this much easier.

I can breath easier today. Got 10.5.2 installed using the combo updater on my PowerBook. So far so good. That is to say, the hard drive and all its contents seem to still be as they were. I have nothing to report as far as bug fixes yet.

It took me about 8 hours to back up my whole hard drive two days ago using Carbon Copy Cloner. Anyone else think that's just way too long? Arrgh.

The only way I was able to "fix" the mini was to do a new fresh install of Leopard, wiping out the OS partition completely. Then I installed the combo updater. I don't know what I was thinking using the automated update through system update. I won't be doing that again in the future. I will also not shower or shave the day of updates. Still trying to decide if I need to make any type of animal sacrifice or perform a chant.