In the old days of the Classic Mac OS, whenever something went wrong, the standard fix was to rebuild the desktop, check the hard drive with Apple’s disk repair application, and restart. That was the beginning and end of it, even if none of those remedies had anything to do with the problem.

Indeed, I once got involved in a heated exchange with a forum helper on AOL who kept repeating this silly mantra even for issues that could not possibly be repaired in this fashion.

Now the promise of Mac OS X was that its Unix foundation would rid Mac users of extension conflicts, desktop rebuilding and other irritating rituals and usher in a new era of speed and stability.

Well, the truth is that we didn’t get the speed at first, but stability was somewhat better, though never perfect. Applications would still crash, only the event would rarely force you to restart. There was no desktop to rebuild, but the world of Unix brought its own nasty complications, the most prominent of which is permissions.

Now giving a file read and write access was a part of the Classic Mac OS too, but Unix refines the process, and since application and system files are routinely made up of tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of separate files, there’s a whole lot of potential mischief that can occur.

As a result, Apple added a Repair Disk Permissions feature to its Disk Utility to address the problem, although in a very incomplete fashion. It relies on the contents of a folder called Receipts that provides an application and the operating system’s “bill of materials” that catalogs the files and the permissions that apply to those files. If you mistakenly delete those receipt files, unfortunately, or they aren’t present for any other reason, the repair disk function will bypass those apps.

Now wrong permissions may mean that a file won’t open, can’t be properly modified, or any combination of mistakes that might cause erratic system behavior or an application crash. At the very least, the repair process shouldn’t make things worse, so even if it does nothing I suppose it’s worth a try.

However, I can safely tell you that I’ve had maybe one or two problems that can be blamed on permissions issues since I started using Mac OS X, and that started with the original Public Beta in September 2000. Moreover, it’s not that I’m necessarily a shrinking violet when it comes to playing with the system, upgrading early and often and acquiring new systems to test and deploy for my daily work.

More to the point, the most serious of those permissions issues, involving the inability to launch Parallels Desktop 5 on a Mac Pro, was not resolved by Repair Disk Permissions. It required a Terminal command that accomplished a similar purpose, one fed to me by the support people at Parallels. There’s no point even in mentioning the specific command, since it related to a single file listed in my Mac’s crash log. The chances that anyone else would be impacted by the same permissions irregularity are slim to none.

Unfortunately, some Mac troubleshooting resources have taken to making disk permissions repair the prime preventive maintenance procedure before installing software, after installing software, or when you have nothing better to do with your time but watch it happen.

This isn’t to say that the effect is entirely placebo. As I said, there may be times when permissions issues are truly responsible for your grief, but it happens so rarely that you shouldn’t concern yourself about it. Mac application crashes are far more often caused by basic incompatibilities with your OS or a system enhancement or perhaps a damaged preference file. Indeed, repeated crashes often call for just removing that preference file and seeing if things are fixed. Sure, some of your custom settings may disappear when you dump that file, but at least your application will run again.

Now as far as checking the hard drive, well drive directory corruption can occur, though not nearly as often as it did back in the days of the Classic Mac OS. Apple’s Disk Utility, however, limits you to a Verify Disk function when you want to check the startup disk. However, checking the drive can be forced in Snow Leopard by restarting and holding down the Shift key until you see a white screen and a progress bar.

But outright hard drive failures are quite possible. Indeed, it’s fair to say that most of you will confront a hard drive failure at one time or another during the course of working on your Mac, or any personal computer for that matter. Hard drives remain extremely fragile, and that argues all over again for the need to set up a routine for regular and recent backups in case something goes wrong. Product warranties won’t help beyond replacing a failed drive. Lost data remains lost unless you pay a ton of cash to a drive recovery lab.

So checking your hard drive and doing regular backups are probably the two most important troubleshooting steps you can take. As far as the Repair Disk Permissions function is concerned, I usually have better things to do.

If the current stories floating around the Internet are accurate, Apple briefly owned the islate.com domain, but it’s now registered with a different company, although one that reportedly has dealt with Apple in the past.

Regardless of the truth of that domain’s current ownership, the promise of some sort of tablet computer from Apple may have been one of the reasons why the company’s stock price soared to record levels at the end of the past week. Whereas Apple’s previous contenders in new product categories have been greeted with scorn and supreme skepticism, this time the stakes are high that Apple will have yet another winner.

But that takes us back to the core question, which is what purpose such a product might actually serve. The answer depends on a number of factors that only Apple can answer, and you can bet they won’t say very much until the time is right from a marketing standpoint.

Supposedly the truth will be upon us in late January, if the rumors that Apple has rented an exhibition hall for a special media event are accurate. Even if the report is correct, that facility may serve other corporate purposes, including introductions or products that we haven’t speculated about, or maybe it’s just a red herring to draw our attention away from the real event, whatever it might be.

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In recent months, Apple and Nokia have been fighting it out in the courts over various and sundry patent issues. This is quite normal, actually. At any one time, Apple may be embroiled in a number of legal disputes. Some they win, and, frankly, some they lose. Indeed, some years back, Apple had to pay $100 million to Creative Labs for allegedly infringing on some of their intellectual property covering digital music players.

In recent days, Microsoft has found itself in the uncomfortable position of being ordered by the courts to stop selling Microsoft Word because they lost a lawsuit over the rights to edit so-called Custom XML. The suit, filed by a Canadian firm, i4i, claimed that the company first patented the technology back in the 1990s. Indeed, XML appears to be a magic focus of their services which, according to a statement at their site, “is a key enabling technology for the development and deployment of standards-based collaborative content solutions.”

What separates i4i from other companies that hold patent portfolios is the fact that they evidently actually use their intellectual property in providing products or services. You wonder, however, how the world’s largest software maker, with billions of dollars in the bank, somehow overlooked the possibility of infringement in incorporating XML support in Word. It’s not that I am concerned that Microsoft will have any problem paying a $290 million judgment, but you have to wonder if they just took a chance, or screwed up.

Of course i4i evidently got great legal advice. I mean, it’s a very chancy proposition to file a court action against an opponent that is much richer than you are. I was directly affected by a situation in which my sister-in-law was embroiled in a set of nuisance actions filed by someone with $100 million in spare change who happened to take a dislike to my relative, and those entanglements are only now nearing a successful conclusion.

However, i4i was smart in choosing the eastern portion of Texas to file their action, even though neither they nor Microsoft have offices there. That’s because that part of the U.S. appears to be patent suit central as far as successful outcomes are concerned. Sure, many of the complainants in those cases are from patent trolls, companies that hold large portfolios of intellectual property but never do anything other than collect money in licensing deals or as the result of legal settlements.

But it’s also true that some of these legal actions appear to have merit. TiVO, the pioneer inventor of digital video recording technology, successfully sued Dish Network over the rights to build devices that can record one show while playing another. That’s a fundamental DVR capability, and one where Dish found itself on the losing side, although they are appealing to the courts to reconsider a workaround that, they claim, doesn’t infringe on any of TiVO’s rights. I just want to point out that this particular action was also filed in that infamous region of Texas.

In any case, you can bet that Microsoft will release a version of Word that doesn’t contain the offending Custom XML code, or a workaround that doesn’t violate i4i’s intellectual property rights. On the long haul, however, you have to wonder whether U.S. patent law is perhaps behind the times.

Yes, I understand that individuals and companies have the right to protect their inventions. They should also get full support from the courts without going broke to protect themselves, particularly when going after large companies with endless pockets. By the same token, when does a minor refinement to an existing technology merit a patent all by itself?

That’s a question the authorities are wrestling with, because individuals and companies these days are doing what I’d regard as defensive registration. Anything that might vaguely smack of innovation will be given appropriate treatment and sent on to the patent agencies in various countries for resignation. More to the point, the bureaucrats that run those agencies are simply overworked more than ever and are therefore highly likely to grant patents to so-called inventions that really don’t merit them.

When it comes to the companies themselves, you wonder how many of those things ever turn up in actual products, or whether those applications were filed to prevent a competitor from getting there first. It’s a lot less expensive to rush to apply than to defend themselves against the inevitable lawsuit later on.

Of course this explains why the ongoing Apple patent watch doesn’t always provide evidence of a genuine product. Maybe there is one in Apple’s test labs, or maybe they just wanted to make sure they got their first rights before someone else came up with a similar idea, even though there’s little prospect the innovation will ever show up in a finished product.

But that’s still better than the companies who build nothing but make themselves rich by defending rights that only have value if some other company is smart enough to actually use those inventions.

Predictably, folks are now beginning to talk about Snow Leopard’s successor. The key reason is that 10.6 had few sexy features, no list of 200 or 300 “must-haves” that entice you to upgrade. Instead, Snow Leopard is mostly about promises, promises that app developers will soon support such features as Grand Central Dispatch and OpenCL and thus deliver faster performance.

Indeed, owners of Mac Pros and the new quad-core iMacs must surely be disappointed that most of the apps they use never use the extra cores. All that CPU horsepower going to waste, and consider all the money you wasted for extra performance.

But beyond the system functionality, what can Apple do to make its next operating system more of a traditional upgrade, one that’s truly feature leaden? Here’s where things can mighty difficult. Most of the suggestions I’ve seen amount to little more than refinements rather than new features. You can, for example, suggest things Apple ought to do to make the Finder more flexible, perhaps adopting a few of the features of some of those file viewing replacements, such as Path Finder.

Now this is not to say that the Finder is bad, but Path Finder has a rich set of features that fit into the category of “if only” when it comes to Apple’s Finder. One is a Dual Pane File Browser, where you can “View the contents of two folders or volumes side-by-side in one window.”

Next time you open a second Finder window to accomplish that purpose, you start to wonder why Apple has given the Path Finder way some serious thought. It’s not as if Apple is above cribbing features from third parties or simply finding ways to make those products obsolete.

Right now, Path Finder is just one of a load of OS enhancements that are designed to craft new features onto Mac OS X, or simply unlock the stuff Apple puts below the surface, which are normally activated by the command line. My feelings about the latter are largely mixed. I really think Apple can make these capabilities available easily enough, and probably embed them in an interface to die for. On the other hand, I don’t want to see independent developers losing their income sources.

Speaking of income sources, though, I’ve long felt that Apple should be giving Jon Gotow a large check to acquire the rights to Default Folder X. This is the ultimate Open/Save dialog box enhancer, rich with features that should have been blended into Mac OS X long ago. Some of those capabilities are deliciously simple, such as rebounding to the last opened file or folder. You can also rename files and perform other edit functions without returning to the Finder. Why hasn’t Apple caught on?

But I gather from talking to Jon that his product isn’t easy to sell. We’ve tried, by persuading him to advertise on the tech radio show and this site, but the benefits from advertising to a general audience haven’t been realized. He does better focusing on desktop publishers or other content creators, people who really appreciate what he’s trying to do. However, I think all Mac users will benefit, and maybe someone at Apple will get the message and get Jon on the team.

Another feature that ought to appear in 10.7 is the ability to easily rollback your system in case of a failed upgrade. Restoring with Time Machine is time-consuming, except for individual files or fodlers, and not enough of you regularly use a clone backup utility that would be able to let you revert your startup drive to its previous state — or at least the state of the most recent backup — within a relatively short amount of time.

This is the sort of thing people on the Windows platform can do, and certainly it’s easier to foul up your system over there. But that doesn’t mean that every system upgrade from Apple is totally reliable, and they do make mistakes from time to time. More to the point, even with Time Machine, I’m willing to bet that the actual numbers of Mac users who regularly backup their stuff remains depressingly small.

Besides, enhancing Time Machine will only help hardware makers sell more backup drives, so it’s a win-win situation. In the meantime, yes, this does seem to be a suitable opportunity for a third party to exploit, and I wonder why it isn’t happening. The last utility to offer this feature dates back to the Classic Mac OS.

Of course there’s plenty of room for minor fixes. I would still like to see a more predictable Finder, one that would consistently remember location, view options and size. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, and the 64-bit Cocoa version in Snow Leopard is only somewhat better.

And please don’t get me started about the loss of the traditional file creator data, where even generic files, such as MP3 and AIF, would open in the application that crested or last saved them, not a default app of Apple’s selection. Yes, the Finder’s Get Info command helps you change that, but this is the sort of alteration that we didn’t request. Even if Apple claims to have switched to a better method, I think that this is one huge step backwards.