I was forced to upgrade to Leopard last week by a Tiger update gone bad. I'm not convinced I can blame Apple--I've updated my machine hundreds of times before with nary a fault and I was, without thinking about what was going on, installing a monitor and plugging and unplugging USB devices while the update was underway. I might have messed something up.

In any event, I had a problem that I couldn't find enough information to fix (something to do with a file locking problem in the IPv6 code, but I couldn't figure out the file name). Reinstalling the update didn't work. I could only boot into single user mode. So, since I wanted to upgrade to Leopard anyway and 10.5.1, the first Leopard update, had just been released, I decided to just upgrade to Leopard.

Normally I'd have done a fresh install, using a back up image as the machine to restore apps and users, but because I had a machine that wouldn't boot and my image was a few days out of date, I decided to just upgrade. Seemed to work fine--I've been using Leopard now for 4 or 5 days without noticing anything untoward. Things are speedy and stable.

Mail.app, Apple's mail application was significantly upgraded and so several add-on bundles I've come to rely on broke. MiniMail had an update that worked fine.

MailTags has a beta that kept hanging Mail.app, so I've uninstalled that for now. I'm hoping a working version is out soon since tags are my security blanket for finding email in the one-big-pile-of-old-email scheme I use for filing archived messages.

Letterbox was the mail bundle I've used the longest. It displays a three-pane mail view of mail with the selected message to the right of the message list rather than under it. I had no idea how much I'd come to like it. A Letterbox still isn't available and I was really hating email with the standard over-under configuration. Fortunately, I found a replacement: Widemail. I've only been using it for a few days, but so far, so good.