post by Mitchell "the Mac nihilist" Sigman Being the ahead-of-curve kind of guy I am, this weekend I decided to upgrade my studio's dual 2 gig G5 to Leopard OSX (aka OSX 10.5). I updated the Intel tower at audioMIDI with no problems, so I thought, "hey, this'll be a piece of cake". Hardy har on me. HELL RIDE #1: After installing the whole update DVD, I joyously restarted my G5, waited, and by the time it got to the blue screen before the desktop hits, it just, well, stayed blue. Nothin'. Locked up. After a couple of hours of fixing permissions, zapping PRAM and doing all the other crap one traditionally does when sudden Mac death strikes (i.e. the stuff that never works), I ended up trolloping through tons of forums searching for an answer to my woes. As it turned out, the seemingly innocuous Unsanity Windowshade system extension I had installed  (or "haxie" as they call 'em) spells death and carnage for Leopard OS. Fortunately I had my Macbook laptop with me, and I was able to boot up the G5's drives using firewire disk target mode in order to locate and trash the offending extension. All was well. Sort of. HELL RIDE #2: Hey, revised Mac Mail. Neat. Hey, my mighty mouse control panel now works properly (don't ask). Hey, maybe I'll open up Logic Pro, the reason I have a computer in the studio in the first place. Click-click.... BOOM! "Uh, gee, uh, why did Logic instantly crash upon bootup?" (repeat this procedure 34 times or so). Check forums. Nothing. Remove RME audio card. Crash. Remove two Universal Audio UAD-1 cards. Crash. Quote words George Carlin said you weren't allowed to say on TV. Repeatedly. Troll forums, troll forums... call Apple reps (away from desk). Sweat some more. Troll more forums. FINALLY find a forum entry mentioning that the Rewire extension installed by Melodyne can make Logic crash in Leopard. Really? What? That doesn't even make sense. Good thing I don't use Melodyne Rewire function. Now Logic opens. And proceeds to crash the Audio Units (in)validator program a zillion times trying to verify the 75 Waves plug-ins that worked fine prior to the update. Just for fun, with each plug it attempted to verify, it would send me to the iLok website to "download the necessary extensions". EVERY TIME.  Hmmm, they were all they there and doing their thing yesterday. And there wasn't an updated version of the iLok extensions for Leopard (but just for extra insult-to-injury factor, there was message on the Pace iLok page informing me that if I was repeatedly sent here by my host app, it surely was no fault of theirs, and definitely a problem with the host app. A well played preemptive software-company-point-the-finger-at-the-other-guy move if I ever saw one). So this is where I'm at right now. Hello, uh, Waves? Help....