Re: Greetings from OSX 10.5.6
I had an interesting experience with 10.5.6.
As I said in my earlier post, I am a Mac newbie. After the house took an indirect lightning hit this past fall, I ended up having to replace a less than one year old HP Vista box (your basic Best Buy special.) Since my wife, son and daughter each already had a Macbook, it made sense to replace the desktop with a Mac. I opted for the 3.06 GHz, 24" iMac with 4 GB SDRAM. I've been slowly getting up to speed ever since. I still have some minor glitches with the Airport Extreme network (slower throughput on the Wii and PS3 than the old PC/Linksys setup) and disc burning is considerably slower on the iMac than the PC. Based on the recommendations here, I purchased Toast 9 Titanium and that has helped somewhat. I still find it takes 7-9 minutes to copy your average music CD, compared to 2-3 minutes on the Vista PC. Beyond these small quibbles, I LOVE the new iMac.
Back to the topic at hand. On Thursday (after I updated to 10.5.6 using the file that was waiting for me in the dock,) a buddy sent me an email with an MP3 attachment. The email caused Mail to crash. We're not talking about the attachment mind you, but the message itself. It was like Catch 22. Mail would open, and as soon as it did, it would try to display the message that contained the attachment and then crash. I ended up sending an email from my wife's Macbook to the iMac. Since it did not contain an attachment, I was able to keep Mail open without shutting down. I shift-highlighted both messages and deleted them. And that, I thought, was that. I emailed my friend and told him his attachment appeared to be corrupted and he said he would remake the MP3 and re-send in a few days.
Fast-forward to yesterday. As I was leaving work for holiday break, I had a couple of unfinished projects that I wanted to work on at home next week. Since I was in a hurry to leave, rather than burn a handful of files to CD, I opted to email them home as attachments. We're talking small Word docs and a couple of PDF files. When I got home last night and opened Mail, the same thing happened again. Instant crash-ola! In frustration this morning, I called Apple tech support. It took about an hour and a half to get it figured out, but I finally got it fixed. The culprit? Apparently, the automatic update file that Apple sends to sleeping machines is NOT the combo update, and as far as I can tell, it CAUSES the Mail problem that the combo update corrects! In the end, it was an easy fix, just download the combo update and do an over-the-top install on the other version.
My advice to anyone upgrading to 10.5.6 is to check your version of Mail first. If it is anything less than 3.5, manually download the combo update from Apple's web site and install that one. You'll be glad you did.
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