After four maintenance updates, with many more on the way over Leopard’s expected lifecycle — and I am not counting security fixes — it’s a sure thing that the worst ills are behind us. Typical of most Apple software these days, the original version was somewhat shaky, betraying evidence of a rushed release.

Now I installed Leopard on Day One, and, in most respects, it works just fine, with precious few mysterious crashes or other examples of anomalous behavior. I’d like to say the experience is perfect, but I know better. I’d want to say that Apple needs to improve its quality control, so you don’t have to wait months for things to settle down, but don’t expect to happen anytime soon. Apple has no incentive to do things better, so long as sales keep climbing and profits keep pouring in.

Yes, I know Apple’s stock has taken a beating of late, but product quality issues aren’t really responsible. You might attribute some of that to jitters about the state of the economy and ongoing concerns about the state of health of Apple’s CEO. To be sure, I think some stock speculators also delight in manipulating prices to enhance their own nefarious schemes, but as long as the SEC isn’t cracking down on such behavior, I don’t expect such things to change anytime soon.

Maybe that’s one reason I’ve historically stayed away from the stock market, besides the fact that, as a journalist, I really shouldn’t be buying shares in the companies I cover. Yes, I do believe in ethics, although that’s sometimes a hard commodity to find these days.

Returning to Leopard, I continue to have a love and hate relationship with Leopard’s Spaces feature. In the past, I used system enhancements that automatically hide everything but the application I was working in (yes I know you can do it manually). I think that’s probably still one of the best solutions to reduce window clutter for most Mac users.

Spaces, however, is different, because it allows you to create multiple desktop environments, each supporting only the applications you want. It may be, in fact, a great solution for folks who might otherwise consider buying a Mac Pro, extra graphic cards, and as many monitors as you can fit on your computer desk.

In theory, Spaces is simple to configure. Just open the Exposé and Spaces preference panel in System Preferences, and make sure Spaces is selected. From here, you can assign up to four rows and four columns of spaces, a total of 16 in all. An application can be assigned to a single space or to all of them; it would be nice for a midrange choice, where an application occupies two spaces and maybe there’s a third-party solution or a trick to doing that, but I haven’t seen it, and the need hasn’t really arisen for me anyway.

If Spaces worked as advertised, it would be a dream solution, particularly in concert with Exposé. But things get complicated with applications that spawn separate document windows and formatting or configuration palettes. While successive improvements in Spaces have made the problem less severe with the various Leopard updates, the situation is still not perfect.

Some applications, for example, will open one window in one space, and another in a second having nothing to do what what you originally selected. This tends to happen most often if you launch that application (usually from the Dock) when you’re in a different space than the one configured for that application.

Now it may well be that the it’s not Apple’s problem at all, that application developers need to perform some programming legerdemain behind the scenes to take better advantage of Spaces. I’ll leave it to them to sort all this out. For now, after giving up Spaces entirely, I’ve returned to it grudgingly, since it’s more good than bad for my purposes. But maybe 10.5.5, which I’m sure is inevitable some time in the next few months, will help set things right. Or at least less wrong.

Other Leopard issues are less injurious of productivity, so they don’t bother me so much. I do not, for example, understand why Apple insisted on having items in the Help menu display in a smaller typeface than the rest of the menu bar labels. Sure, there may be a practical reason, that the text for some of those Help items might be wider than the others. But my design sensibilities still tell me that this is wrong.

The so-called 3D Dock doesn’t bother me in the least, by the way. Your eye gets used to the little blue glowing ball below an application that indicates it’s open. And, aside from pinning the Dock on the left or right sides of your screen, various Mac OS X maintenance and enhancement utilities are perfectly capable of changing the look and feel to the way you want.

When it comes to AirPort reception, I didn’t suffer from the inconsistent performance issues that afflicted others, perhaps some of my gentle readers. Unfortunately, Wi-Fi is not a perfect technology, and it operates on the same frequency range as many other devices, including portable phones, microwaves and others. That it works at all in that sea of radiation sometimes strikes me as a miracle, and I concede that there’s only so much Apple can do about the situation.

But I’d still like to see more consistent performance from the Back to My Mac feature, which interfaces with MobileMe. In theory, I should be able to connect to my Mac’s desktop remotely when I’m on the road. It will work when the router in use is Apple’s, but otherwise, it’s hit or miss. Supposedly Apple continues to work on compatibility with third-party routers. According to their support materials, “NAT-PMP or UPnP must be enabled” on your router. Beyond that, you need to contact MobileMe support if the standard remedies don’t succeed.

I know my list is short, and yours may be a lot larger. But that’s what our Comments section is for.

So Microsoft promises to do its best to work with its PC maker partners and somehow give Windows users more of a taste of the Mac experience. Once again, the Redmond giant isn’t so much interested in bettering Apple with its products. It’s only too happy to come a little closer, if it can.

That assumes, of course, that its concept of just good enough is really an improvement. After all, haven’t they been trying to do that for over 20 years? It’s not as if they succeeded by developing superior products. But a promise and a little bait and switch has served them well and afforded them long-term dominance over an entire industry.

Now with Macs ascendant after being counted out as a tiny niche player for so many years, you have to wonder what’s being done to combat those popular Mac versus PC ads. Will Microsoft deliver a counterpunch, or just make another unfulfilled promise?

This is not to say that third parties aren’t helping Microsoft, even if their methods aren’t so overt. But they might at times seem far more calculated, and sometimes they are, well, inadvertent.

Story continued in this week’s Tech Night Owl Newsletter.

During this week’s episode of The Tech Night Owl LIVE, my friend Adam Engst, a noted Mac author and editor, was talking with me about the fact that Internet connections on the Mac generally work perfect out of the box, as it were.

Except when they don’t.

You have undoubtedly come across such situations. Say you are trying to connect wirelessly to the Internet using your Mac’s AirPort card. Most times, it works just fine. Sometimes, it just won’t make the connection. Try and try again, and it still fails.

Now Adam spoke of one such instance during the interview on the show, where he had to connect his Mac via FireWire, using TCP, to another Mac to share a connection and get online. His conclusion about such matters: “There’s a certain amount of chaos in the universe that we’re never gonna be able to break free of.”

Now I am not talking here about paranormal phenomena or the other weird stuff we cover in detail on our other radio show, The Paracast. Instead, I’m talking about the trials and tribulations we all encounter on a regular basis with all sorts of electronic gear.

I know I’ve run into situations of this sort occasionally when performing various tasks on my Macs. At least 98% of the time, everything works perfectly. Then, to site one example, an application quits, but that particular symptom doesn’t appear again for at least several weeks. Now I know that random crashes and other anomalous behavior, if it’s repeated fairly often, may be traced to defective RAM or some other hardware ailment. But these occurrences are far too rare for that.

Surely it happens to you, and, if you think about it, you can probably set down an ongoing diary about other weird events on your Mac. It’s easy to forget about them, unless you take note at the time, as weeks of bliss may cause the unsavory moments to fade from your conscious memory

But it’s not just personal computers that are afflicted by such ailments. I dare say lots of electronics can do things that are totally strange.

For example, I use a Logitech Harmony 890 universal remote. It’s really a well-designed product, with backlit display and color LEDs for the main functions. With a little time and effort, you can program it it to work with pretty much any standard home entertainment device, from your cable or satellite company’s set top box, to your TV, DVD and even your trusty old VCR.

Without going into much detail, the Harmony sometimes has to be set so it activates a function, perhaps to turn on your TV, and then enters a pause before it activates your cable box. If that doesn’t happen, it will try to switch them both on at the same time, and that can cause problems. Well, this is one of those situations where everything works most of the time. But every few days, one or more devices fails to turn on, or the TV’s input setting goes to VCR, when you really want it to switch to the DVD player.

Well, Logitech has a Help feature on its remote that assists you in finding a resolution by asking simple questions, such as whether the TV is on, whether it switched your home theater audio system to the correct input and on and on until it resolves your problem.

Sometimes, you just have to dig out the old remotes and do it all manually.

Now I suppose you could blame Logitech for not being able to anticipate all the possibilities of perhaps holding the remote at the wrong angle, or a glitch in the software on the entertainment gadget in question that makes it respond incorrectly to a random command. Eventually, the system breaks down and you have to just turn it all off and start again.

But these functions are relatively simple and straightforward in the scheme of things.

With personal computers, whether a Mac or a PC, you are dealing with sophisticated operating systems containing millions of lines of code. One function depends and 20 others, which, in turn, depend on another set of code activating still another command at the very same time. It’s amazing that it ever works.

Long ago, a tech support supervisor from a hardware company gave he his pet theory, that programmers are actually just a tiny bit insane to go into that profession. Now I’m not singling out anyone in particular here; I’m just telling you what he said. Anyway, after a number of years on the job, the programmer might occasionally slip out of control and express the encroaching insanity with errant code entries. So if the proper conditions are met, things will go wrong.

In another situation, I actually had a lead programmer from a company come to my home office and try to debug a problem they had difficulty reproducing. Well, after I demonstrated how easily it was to repeat the problem, which caused my Mac to crash, he opened the source code, which he had copied to his note-book, and fiddled around with something. After a few minutes of this, he pronounced the problem cured.

Indeed, he gave me the revised version of the utility, and the crashes were history. That version became the final shipping build for the product, a tiny app that would simply flash an icon on your Mac’s menu bar when the hard drive was reading or writing data. Nothing to it, right? Well, evidently the original developer, who sold the code to the software company in question, left a single line of code that, under most circumstances, did nothing. When a certain combination of functions were present, however, it would go into a endless loop, and your Mac would crash.

Now I won’t mention the name of that programmer. I’m sure he has long since lived that one down, but I bet he’ll know what I’m talking about if he reads this article.

But between the eccentricities of the developers, just plain human error, and maybe the great unknown, hardware and software will occasionally misbehave. Worse, sometimes we’ll never know why.

A now-deceased comedy performer once used the catch phrase, “If it isn’t one thing, it’s another” as part of a classic TV routine. And clearly that applies to Apple Inc. these days.

Indeed, it’s not easy being a star, although many of you have no doubt aspired to that status. For one thing, bottom feeders, jealous people and lots of others will have it in for you. You become a ripe subject of incessant gossip. One misstep, and you’re yesterday’s news.

With Apple’s recent trials and tribulations, it seems very much like theater. First, they ran out of stock of the first-generation iPhone weeks before the new model was scheduled to be released. Now I don’t know if they planned it this way, just to make sure that they didn’t have any leftovers in the stock rooms that had to be sold at closeout prices, or it was just one of those things.

But considering how carefully they keep tabs on inventory, that simply doesn’t pass the logic test. They would have known months in advance if they were about to run out of stock, and could have adjusted production accordingly. I suppose it’s possible they encountered manufacturing difficulties with their new model, or they wanted to start as early as possible to satisfy the initial clamor for the iPhone 3G. Then again, that didn’t work so well now did it?

Or perhaps, as I first suggested, that’s precisely how Apple’s marketing people planned it all along. Make you salivate for the second generation iPhone, and there would be long lines waiting outside Apple’s stores and those of independent resellers to get theirs. Sending lots of disappointed people home because stores ran out of stock also made for good headlines.

What doesn’t sound so good, however, is when things break. I continue to complain about the MobileMe fiasco because it put Apple in the worst possible light. For so long, those Mac versus PC commercials have portrayed Apple products as being easy to use and relatively foolproof, while Windows is a constant source of irritation.

With MobileMe, Apple’s customers simply wanted reliable email service and the ability to sync their stuff in a timely fashion. They don’t want to have contacts and messages disappear from their iPhones, or suffer extended outages where the prospects for full recovery may be questionable.

Now there are a few published reports that claim Apple has finally restored those missing messages to all affected customers, but the MobileMe status blogs speak of restoring “historical” messages and not the recent ones that were identified as lost. Now perhaps the Apple blogger misspoke — or perhaps not. Regardless, the folks who did suffer from lost messages will no doubt chime in soon with their own war stories, if there are any.

When it comes to the App Store, Apple proudly boasts of 25 million downloads in the first week. They don’t, however, talk about the delays in getting application updates posted. A number shipped with crashing bugs or other defects, and it would be nice to have the updates available as quickly as possible. However, Apple has to review each and every product they distribute. While I can understand their concerns and their desire to keep unsavory content off the App Store, legitimate software publishers ought to be treated better.

Another problem is Apple’s NDA, which evidently didn’t expire when the new iPhone software was released and the App Store opened for business. That means, for example, that developers are not only barred from talking with other publishers, but in holding proper external beta testing programs. Even though iPhone apps tend to be simple affairs, with basic features and few options, certainly hardworking developers ought to have full control of their own intellectual property.

On the other hand, Matt Mullenweg and his crew at WordPress have made their iPhone app open source, and, so far at least, Apple hasn’t complained. But give them time.

Now while you might think some of these issues were unfortunate side-effects of the rush to get lots of products and services out real quickly, Apple’s stuff has been infected with a number of early-release bugs in recent years. When the first Intel-based note-books came out, for example, there were battery failures and complaints they ran too hot. The bad batteries were readily replaced, and the cooling fans began to run more efficiently as the result of firmware updates, but calling them laptops was still a stretch. That is, unless you just want to keep your legs warm in the winter.

My 2008 edition MacBook Pro runs a whole lot cooler than the original version, but a lot of that is probably due to the use of Intel’s new Penryn chips, which are are also more power efficient. Running the fans twice as fast didn’t hurt either.

Apple’s Time Machine worked pretty well out of the starting gate, with Leopard’s release, but the Time Capsule router and network backup device had some serious early teething pains. Now mine works just fine, but I didn’t acquire one until after a couple of downloadable updates were released.

I haven’t had a lick of trouble with my Mac Pro, but I was always concerned about danger of leaks from the liquid cooling system on its predecessor, a Power Mac G5 Quad. No, I didn’t have any such issues, nor did the computer’s new owner, but there have been some troubling reports. You can well understand why Apple was delighted to ditch the ultra-hot running G5 and move on to Intel’s processors. Yes, the Pentium 4 was notorious for running hot, but that was yesterday.

Meantime, Apple’s reputation for smooth-running, reliable products and services has been tarnished. Yes, they can live it down, and they are certainly doing better than some of the competition. But too many failures will not help their bottom line, particularly if a lot of potential Windows switchers decide that things aren’t really so much better on the other side of the tracks.