OS X 10.5 kicked my ass

There's common sense, and then there's technolust. Common sense dictates that you don't upgrade your production laptop to a relatively untested operating system, but technolust says "ooooh, yea, heh huh huh, do it!" And so began the journey into darkness, so innocently begun with the simple act of slipping a DVD into the drive.

A list of the problems encountered, in case I get the urge to reinstall anytime soon:
• Blue screen upon install - yes, the Haxie kind, and yes, I thought I had deleted all the right things. Solved.
• Forgot my printers when upgrading. Reinstalled.
• Periodically dropping WiFi connection with my 2wire DSL modem. Never solved.
• Frequent broadband link errors with 2wire DSL, which then eats the URL, and requires restarting the browser. Never solved.
• iDisk didn't sync right, needed to delete and re-sync. But then iDisk (incorrectly) expands to fill every last byte of my HD ... with an honest-to-goodness 0 bytes free ... and then takes five or six attempts to get it to stop trying to sync.
• Back to My Mac didn't work outside of my house, more or less rendering it useless except for playing pranks on my kids
• New menubar has deleted the rounded corners, one of my favorite things about the whole OS X experience. Yes, there are third-party apps to put them back, but see Haxie above.
• New dock is shiny, shiny, shiny. And annoying. Fixed with the SoftGlass app from VersionTracker.
• Stacks can only show a few icons before they switch to a less-interesting grid mode.
• Sudden, overwhelming nostalgia for the all-white menu bar.

And the kicker? The whole reason I installed it (other than that pesky technolust thing) was to check out how CalDAV would work for syncing iCal with a mail server. Which didn't work with three flavors of mail server that we tried out.

So I grabbed my 10.4 install disks that came with the MacBook Pro, and started the reinstall. And then found out that they were actually the 10.4 install disks for my wife's MacBook Pro, and wouldn't work on my laptop. Panic set in. Was I destined to stay in Leopardland forever? I tore apart the house ... it was a grueling, nasty whirlwind through the place, white fluffy puppy sensing my panic and follwing me around, 6 inches from my heels, panting and whining. Found a long-lost video camera, a couple of dust bunnies, but no CDs.

Screwed?

Never! I eventually ended up getting 10.4 reinstalled, through the following scary scenario:
• Back up entire Home folder onto FireWire 800 drive
• Boot my laptop in FireWire target mode
• Plug my laptop into my wife's laptop, as an external FireWire drive
• Boot wife's laptop using her 10.4 install disks
• Very, very, very carefully choose the external FireWire drive as the target for an Erase & Install
• Have visitor check that I did, indeed, choose the right drive
• Double-check the drive onto which the install was going to be happening
• Kick off the install, which included a heart-stopping reboot and DVD-change halfway through
• Shut down and disconnect everything
• Hold breath and boot wife's laptop ... to find everything just like she left it (woot!)
• Boot my laptop, download updates, restore everything off of FireWire 800 drive
• Reinstall several dozen apps, re-enter serial numbers, and generally tidy up

Phew. Back to where I was five days ago. What a ride.