If this wonkiness with the finder keeps up, I'm going back to 10.5 Starting last night, my mouse is not acting right. It keeps moving over my desktop. If it's at the top right of the screen and I move it just a little bit, it'll skip down to the lower middle or wherever...I have to move the mouse again to find it.

First though, I'll do a clean install (if it's possible with the 10.6 disk I got for $29) and see if that clears things up.

If not, then I'll wipe and reinstall 10.5 and wait until 10.6 gets it's act together.

Still, not a single problem on two computers here.

I don't know if it's the OS or the hardware, so this way I can at least possibly narrow it down.

I'm wondering if it's hardware because my firewire CF card won't mount until I plug/unplug it several times. It'll mount on the 1st time at school on their macs.

My usb hard drives keep disconnecting unexpectedly from the desktop.

And the finder just sometimes becomes unresponsive when I either stick a DVD/CD in the drive, or mount something (either from an installer or external connection).

So that's why I'm going to do this. Just need to make sure things are backed up first!

You're having a lot of I/O problems, odd. Try a Clean install of 10.6 first. The disc you have will do it BTW.

Ugh! Arrrrrrrgh!

I just ordered SL from Amazon and it is on its way to my PO box.

I guess I'll just put it on a shelf for a while

Just load the disk and click install. You will enjoy the speed boast. They likely half sold more than a million. A small percentage will screw up the install. WE will have to get used to this as Macintosh popularity increases. The screw ups will be measured in the tens maybe even hundreds.

Even if you screw it up, you can go back and unscrew it.

okay

I did two clean installs starting off with Leopard added my third party apps then ran Snow Leopard .
Both times things ran smooth for a day then Finder crashes freezing on start up and shutdown if the computer went to sleep it would shut down the power button would not start the computer up I had to unplug the computer from the wall socket then plug it back in then the power button would work.
I took my iMac to the Apple Store twice and I was without it for 12 firkin days Apple said there was nothing wrong.
All they did was yank my chain.
On the second trip they replace the power supply and cable and said everything is perfect.
I took it home it ran fine until I started it up in the morning it F'in froze,restarted the finder crashed,reset the SMC for the millionth time and the next restart it froze as the dock was loading.
USB problems as soon as I put my 3GS in the dock the mac would freeze.
Firewire three firewire drives chained no problems loading sometimes the disks would take two minutes to eject.
Photoshop adding text to a jpg the mac would log out of my user account then log back in.
Freezes using Disk Utility.
No problems with airport very strong connection.
Printer sharing,file sharing worked Ok.
I do a lot of video rendering no problems.
Time Machine worked very well in Snow Leopard
There are a lot of other bugs in Snow Leopard I will not go into.

So I reformatted again doing a clean install this time Leopard only and Guess What ?
Everything works as it should.
I booted into Snow Leopard last evening for two minutes the Finder Crashed and booted back to Leopard and will continue to stay until Apple gets it's S_it Together

And I still have had absolutely no problems either on my 2.0 GHz Mini (refurbed model - two generations ago) nor my wife's refurbed 1.66 GHz Mini.