About 4 hours later, and now I’m reinstalling Tiger using the “Archive and Install” method.

I know, I know, I know…millions of Mac OS X users do a straight upgrade of major operating system releases and all is hunky dorry with the world. For some reason, I have never been one of those people.

At first…the upgrade went smoothly. Almost too easy. Almost. After installing 10.4 from the DVD, I ran Software Update to bring everything up-to-date.

First problem was when I was test driving InDesign CS 2. Fonts that I activated in Font Agent Pro were not showing up in Adobe Creative Suite 2 menus. I’m using the latest Tiger-happy versions of everything, so it shouldn’t have been a problem. I think I dumped a few pref files to get that under control.

Next, iTunes 5.0.1 wouldn’t launch. It just sat there with the spinning beach ball. Worse, it was impossible to quit. Found a reference to this on [MacFixItForums](http://www.macfixitforums.com). Nuked some preference files and reinstalled iTunes to get that working again.

Then I realized that my right-click wasn’t working with my Logitech mouse. I use [USB Overdrive](http://www.usboverdrive.com) to customize the mouse buttons for different applications. I disabled that, thinking something was funky there but then *both* buttons were acting like right-clicks! I couldn’t select anything. Spent some time remembering every keyboard shortcut I ever knew in order to get that under control.

Finally, menus weren’t behaving. Instead of clicking on let’s say the “File” menu and then sliding around to the “Edit” menu and down submenus, clicking a second time to select the item I wanted, I had to click and *hold* down on the mouse to select items. I tried everything I could to troubleshoot it…restarted with a shift-restart to “safe” mode…nope. Created a second administrative user…nope. I fiddled with settings, Googled, couldn’t figure out what was wrong. Then all of a sudden, network settings disappeared and that’s when I knew it was time to throw in the towel on this one.

I’m doing an “Archive and Install” installation this time (upgrade is no longer an option since I brought the OS up to 10.4.2) and I deselected the checkbox to “Preserve Users and Network Settings” My network settings were fried. I don’t want them back. My old files will be archived in the “Previous System folder” and I’ll have to fetch them back.

I don’t want to wipe out the disk and start over, but I guess I can if I have to. Everything is backed up.

Why did I want to upgrade today? Right now I can’t remember. Oh yeah, my drive was acting up…so I’d like to think the headaches were inevitable.