Leopard Woes

by

I’m still in the middle of what is now a two day Leopard migration, and things haven’t gone as smoothly as I would have liked. I’ll go into that a little later. For now I wanted to mention 3 issues I’m having, and ask if other Leopard up-graders have experienced any of these problems…

Dashboard:
I’ve been having a lot of problems with Dashboard under Leopard. One minute everything will be working fine, the next all my widgets will freeze up, and the only way to get them working again is to logout. While they’re frozen I can pull-out new widgets, and drag all the widgets around, but non of them are actually functioning.

I found a lot of people over on the Apple Discussion Boards having problems with Dashboard, but many of them relate the problem to Apple’s new Parental Controls. I haven’t activated Parental Controls so I don’t think that’s it. In my case it appears to be related to non-Apple Widgets being installed. I’ve finally been able to make Dashboard a little more stable by going through this procedure:

  1. I used Dashboard’s built-in Widget Manager to delete all non-Apple Widgets.
  2. I deleted the Widget cache files at ~/Library/Caches/DashboardClient/.
  3. I deleted these preference files:
    ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.dashboard.client.plist
    ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.dashboard.plist
    All pref files starting with widget-com…
  4. Logout

After that Dashboard seems to be working normally. But, if I try to add Widgets back in, the problems start back up. This sucks if third-party Widgets can break Dashboard. Has anyone else had this problem?

Repair Permissions:
I was having some weirdness, so I tried repairing permissions. The process now takes several minutes, and I end up with a long list of errors (about 50). Every error is the same, except each refers to a different file or folder… They all start, “ACL found but not expected on…(path to file or folder)”. Disc Utility cannot repair the problems. I don’t know if this is a serious problem or not, but I don’t like it.

Safari:
One minute Safari will be a speedy browser that renders beautifully. The next it’s a tired dog that hesitates to do anything. In fact, at times it actually refuses to connect to a site, telling me that I’m not connected to the internet. Given that Firefox on the same machine will load the site, I’m pretty sure I am connected to the internet.

I did install Inquisitor. It’s supposedly Leopard-ready, but I’m not so sure. I can’t actually tell though if the problems I’m having are related or not. Has anyone else had problems with the new Safari?

At this point I’m debating on wiping the drive and starting over, or accepting these as known bugs and waiting for Apple to come out with a patch. Has anyone else had these (or other) problems. Have any solutions to share?

7 thoughts on “Leopard Woes”

  1. I’m gald I’m not the only one lol.
    Had some success in getting leopard to run but every now and then a suprise awaits me when I start up.I install mac pilot and had everything running smooth download speed is a bit on the dail up side but also have problems with the provider as well with ther cable.
    Manager to get time machine working after I formated the back up drive because I was thinking of doing the same thing in downgrading back to tiger but I had to re formated the drive a few times until time machine would erase it. There has been a few other hic ups but not the worst that can happen firewall dosen’t like skype and I dowmload the latest beta it seems to working fine but once again one can only hold their breath. That’s the problem on upgrading to a new os but the news is apple is about to release 10.5.1 soon and it is already been test by developers.

  2. i have also had problems with leopard… the problem is safari, firefox will run smoothly, yet safari will not find the server. i have inquisitor on my safari as well, is there a reason for that to stop safari from working? anyway my bluetooth dosent even work on my 1G macbook, it can send files but it will not receive them, itz a problem other people have had when trying to pair with mobile phones. What is even more worrying is that it isint even on the list of bugfixes for 10.5.1 so itz gonna be a long time before it will feel like home on my laptop again…

  5. @ Kirk – Your right mouse button is activating Exposé. This should be something you can configure in your Keyboard & Mouse Preference Pane.

    Do you see any checkboxes or pulldown menus that relate to the right button?

  6. installed leopard… now Safari freezes after typing 3 letters into Google search???

    not computer literate… can anyone troubleshoot this problem

    thanks

Leave a Comment