Thanks to all who offered help with this. I seem to have things fixed now. What I did was drop back and punt; I got out the Leopard disk and did an "Archive and Install," and after that I did the 10.5.8 combo update.
At that point everything ran fine. I tested my new Safari and it worked great. My old "Safari (original)" icon was still sitting there in the Applications folder, right beside a new Safari app (or whatever it is's) icon, so I trashed the old one and flushed it away. The freshly installed Safari ran with no problems, and I was able to make aliases of it like normal too. Then it occurred to me to check what version of Safari was running, since I hadn't yet done any further Software Updates, and it turned out to be Safari 3.2.1. So here I had a freshly minted 10.5.8 happily running Safari 3---the same way it was running v.4 yesterday (my complaint was not how it ran, but the fact that I couldn't update it, rename it, or make any aliases of it). All of which makes me wonder whether Leopard 10.5.8 really cares which version of Safari it runs, since version 3, 4, or 5, all seem to run fine with it. Or are the earlier versions a lit fuse and a ticking time bomb? However, being the daring, devil-may-care sort of fellow I am, the next thing I did was to run Software Update and bring Safari up to v. 5, just because, as Bill Clinton says, I could. I say daring because, having run Macs since 1986, I know from sad experience that updating things when they're working fine, just because you can, is often a fool's errand and a mug's game. Many's the time I've updated something only to have the update break things and initiate a long, slow, and frustrating process of troubleshooting trying to get everything back in working order again--printers stop printing, scanners stop scanning, mail ceases to flow, plug-ins unplug, aliases disconnect, the parrot bites my finger, and sometimes I never do get everything running as well as it did before. In fact, whenever my wife sees me sitting in front of the computer ripping out tufts of my hair, punching holes in the wall, and heaping ashes on my head, she'll say, "You've gone and updated something again, haven't you?" As far as computers are concerned, my motto is the old Disney song "Leave Well Enough Alone." But maybe I got away with it this time. Time will tell. -- You received this message because you are a member of G-Group, a group for those using G3, G4, and G5 desktop Macs - with a particular focus on Power Macs. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-list.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/g3-5-list
