At this point, several of you have already experienced the harrowing excitement surrounding the Apple’s [AAPL] OS X 10.5.7 update for Macs.
Earlier today, I’d spotted the OS update on my MacBook White while traveling. I did not think anything unusual about it, since it was just started to make the rounds, and nobody had yet begun to report odd occurrences with it… So I accepted the update notice from the Software Update applet and attended to other business…
An hour later, when I returned to gather my things, I saw that the update transaction had failed.
Uh-oh. Redrum?
Apparently, there was a security violation error that occurred during the download process; a checksum had failed. I chalked that up to some sort of issue with the wireless download at my (temporary) location.
So, I waited a few hours and tried again… The download completed successfully, but then during the installation process, it seemed that the system rebooted more than once.
Now that was odd… Another multi-reboot update? It’s been a loooong time since one of those. What was the security patching involved?
The update took a quite some time, on a notebook that was only newly acquired and set up, so there was not much cruft on the system. Nevertheless, it took quite some time, at least twenty minutes, before the system completed the update. Once it completed, I noticed that instead of bringing the system back online, it had been shut down.
Curious and curiouser…
Although I feared the worst, it did not seem to manifest, as I restarted the notebook and logged in. Nothing out of the ordinary. Seems good. Business as usual. Cool beans. And Java development, while we’re at it. 
But I wonder how many other people were having problems, or at the very least hiccups such as mine. Apparently, as I did some browsing on the subject, other people had experienced problems, some fairly severe. Hopefully, a more recent revision of the update will be available, or a remedial update available from Apple.
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I’ve been extremely lax in issuing the updates for all of my Macs because of the earlier problems with the 10.5.7 Update. However, earlier today, I accepted the update request on the MBP 17″… unfortunately, I only have 1.3 GB available space on it, but the update package requires at least 1.9 GB. I tend to double the minimum amount, in case something happens with disk caching or temp space, so I’ll be doing a lot of shuffling around!
For those of you who need a quick blurb about why OS X 10.5.7 may be worth upgrading to, here’s what TheAppleBlog says about it: http://theappleblog.com/2009/05/12/apple-releases-mac-os-x-update-10-5-7/