Leopard Rebirth - Reinstallation of the OS

So I installed Leopard over a week ago now via the upgrade method, which by all appearances worked out quite well. At first everything seemed to be working fine and I didnt seem to have any of the issues that have been mentioned by others performing the upgrade, such as the "blue screen of death".

During the week though, I did notice a few things. For example whenever I started the OS, I received a cryptic message stating "The application crashed" and asking me if I would like to notify Apple. For the life of me though, I havent been able to find out what the application was, I looked in the console, I disabled the various login items under my user account, I removed files from the startup directories (e.g. menumeters, wifind etc) and still I got the error message.

Secondly I had a problem with the finder/applications folder. Whenever I clicked on it for the first time after starting the computer, I would get the SBOD (Spinning Beachball of Death) for a few minutes, then the system would sort itself out and the applications would be visible.

I was also having some problems with the screensaver, if I started the screensaver and went away for a while for lunch or something, when I came back the display was flickering. After investigation it looked as though a second instance of the screensaver had launched and was somehow, superimposed over the first one (this was also confirmed when I moved the mouse, the password prompt would appear but the screensaver would continue to run in the background. If I clicked outside the prompt, I got a second password dialogue).

I also noticed that the computer seemed to be running hot more often than it had used to under Tiger.

There were also some problems with the finder in the coverflow view as I mentioned in an earlier post, at the moment Im not entirely sure if this is the fault of the documents or the operating system. Unfortunately I just started cloning my original hdd to a backup so Im unable to test this right now (at the moment Im running on a clean install of Leopard from an external drive).

All of these things together lead me to decide that during the weekend (today), I would try a clean install and see of the problems were still present.

So I backed up my files from one external disk to another, then on the first disk that was now "clean", I installed the fresh version of Leopard (details of the installation to follow in a later post).

Lo and behold, after the starting from the new installation on the external disk, the problems that I was having seem to be gone. Clicking on the applications folder now instantly displays the applications, letting the screensaver run for a while works as you would expect it to and no further superimposed versions of it appeared. I havent had any error messages on startup, which as there are no programs running at start is to be expected I guess, just in the mess that was my original hdd, I never managed to find what caused it in the first place.

Finally the computer also seems cooler but its still too soon to say.

Anyway, I've seen enough right now to convince me to reinstall my main internal HDD with a fresh copy of Leopard and then migrate my settings over later. Ive just start carboncopycloner and Im backing up the internal to a WD My Book as I type, once done Im going to start the install on the internal.

I'll let you know how it goes.