Just because solving a problem is easy doesn’t mean it’s an easy problem. The issue of “corrupted” or out-of-spec font files causing operating system or application crashes is a long-standing thorn in the side of Mac users and administrators. That’s because font files are software that interacts directly with the OS, but that software is often judged (and purchased) on aesthetic, rather than technical, grounds. While the problem of bad font software isn’t likely to go away any time soon, it’s at least possible to solve the problem of locating and removing those files.

You’re looking for an email invitation you sent months ago, but the option to search through each “Entire Message” in Mail is grayed out entirely. Instead, you search iCal for the appointment itself, only to find the results are empty. Thinking you have the minutes stored somewhere on your hard drive, you try searching in the Finder but discover that even items displayed in open windows can’t be located. Spotlight indexing has broken on your local machine.

In many ways, OS X 10.5.7 is a huge improvement for Leopard users, enhancing Finder network reliability, iCal server interaction, and portable home directory performance. In a managed Open Directory environment, however, it may also have the unfortunate side effect of locking you out of your legacy PowerPC machines.

If you support an art department as part of your job, chances are the Adobe Creative Suite is all they really care about. The OS could go without updates, Office could go without security patches, and you could go on vacation without them noticing as long as Photoshop, InDesign, and Acrobat all worked properly. Which is why it’s so upsetting when a CS4 installation that’s worked for months suddenly gives this error instead:

For a much-ballyhooed feature when Leopard premiered, iCal Server has had a checkered history, dangerously unstable for its first few minor updates and providing little more than database corruption, frustration, and an excuse to use the word “ballyhooed”. Now that things have calmed down, many companies are experimenting with the service to see if it’s ready for production.

Backing up client machines to a specially-provisioned network share is one of the marquee features of Leopard Server. Unfortunately, it’s a feature with far more promise than documentation. When it works, it’s a dream, finally freeing you from an aging Retrospect setup (or worse). When it fails, though, it tends to do so without much insight as to what’s gone wrong. If you can’t get Time Machine backing up to a server, you’ll get plenty of detail as to why. Once a machine stops backing up properly, though, there’s no real indication as to how you might get it working again.

If you were to list all the Windows features Macintosh users have wished for, you’d never see the “Blue Screen Of Death” among them. Which is why it’s such a shock when restarting an OS X machine to see the Apple logo, followed immediately by a frozen field of bright blue. Unlike Windows, there’s not even any diagnostic information to accompany the colorful rebuke.

If you support a design department of any size, various font problems have long been a thorn in your side. If your organization hasn’t felt your pain and moved to an expensive server-based solution, that means there’s a good chance you’ve been running some version of Extensis’ Suitcase as your font management tool. Like it’s competitors Font Agent Pro and FontExplorer, Suitcase has had a checkered technical past, but the new Suitcase Fusion 2 seemed to be a well designed and stable product. Then Apple shipped Leopard 10.5.6.

If you’ve tried to upgrade Tiger server to Leopard, you’ve probably already learned that it’s a bumpy road. The process is so fraught with bugs that Apple themselves recommend against it in their Server Essentials manual, stating it should never be preformed on “production” machines. Unfortunately, not every organization has a spare XServe to experiment on, and those sharing files off internal disks may not want the hours of data shuffling that installing from scratch would entail.

While a lot of iPhones sold to corporate customers are connected to the company’s Exchange server, even more float around officially unsupported. At least until something goes wrong. When your VP of Marketing signs a two-year contract on a new toy, your IT department has just gotten into the iPhone business. Which is why it’s so frustrating when you see a message like this sitting in your trouble ticket queue: