Mac OS X 10.5.x Special Report: Display/graphics glitches

Several users are reporting display glitches of various kinds in Leopard. Reader Jonathan writes:

When there is a Finder window open and not selected, it has some strange black outlines around and on the sides of it. If you select the window, this goes away. I've changed wallpapers, rebooted, tried safe mode, etc. Nothing seems to fix it. This is presenting itself in all accounts, even creating a new one doesn't fix it. This is a Fresh CLEAN install and it is an iMac 1.83GHZ Core Duo w/ 2Gb of Ram.

Jonathan sent along a screen shot, which depicting a situation where the processor is clearly attempting to draw the large shadow that goes behind the window. However, it's as if the processor only knew how to draw two colors: black, and nothing. So, above and below the Finder window are solid black bars. To the left and right of the window are thin vertical black lines. And that isn't the only report we've received of shadows being drawn incorrectly on Leopard.

Reader Richard writes that with some video cards, necessary files are actually missing in Leopard, which can cause problems with the display (e.g. smeared pixels) and with sleep:

There is a missing extension in System/Library/Extensions/AppleNDRV (folder) for those who have Ati Radeon 9600 PC and Mac Edition: ATI ROM Xtender is missing in Leopard causing sleep and display problems. The AppleNDVR folder contain only two extensions (AtiDriver.bundle and ATIRuntimeDriver.bundle). You need ATI ROM Xtender from Tiger to have a correct display. Just put it in the folder and restart. I was ready to go back to Tiger when i found this. I did one Archive and Install and one clean Install on two different drives and had display and sleep problems.

The theme here would seem to be that Leopard makes even heavier use of your graphics chip than ever before, which means there is more latitude for things to go wrong.

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