Almost a month after installing Leopard, what more have we learned about using it? How to keep the printer icon from lingering in the Dock after a print job is done, and how to fix problems with Parallels Desktop.

In the previous two installments of this series "From Stripes to Spots", I covered my experiences installing Leopard on my MacBook, and my reactions to using a number of Leopard's new features.

Since then I've found a few quirks and learned a few things about how to circumvent them. First thing I noticed was that in Leopard, after you've printed something, the icon for the printer remains in the Dock, and the printer is still listed as one of the active programs you can Command-Tab through. This is apparently a new behavior in Leopard, one that can be somewhat annoying if you're used to pre-Leopard environments and don't want to see the lingering printer icon in the Dock. You can always switch to the program associated with the printer and quit, but that gets tedious.

Fortunately, there's an easy way to get Leopard to behave the way Tiger used to: right-click on the printer icon in the Dock, and check the "Auto Quit" option in the contextual menu that appears. The printer icon will only appear in the Dock only as long as the print job is active. Hardly a major problem, but easily remedied.

A second issue that came up had to do with running Parallels Desktop under Leopard. I'd been told that Parallels Desktop worked fine under Leopard, but some advanced features didn't work "fully or properly". The only problem I noticed was that the C: drive in my Windows environment did not mount properly and display itself on the Mac OS X desktop. This was a new feature with Parallels Desktop veriosn 3.0, and it's useful but not critical to the functioning of Parallels to run Windows. You see a message from Mac OS X saying that a timeout occurred as the system waited to mount the Windows C: drive. Other than that (and other than the inability to access the C: drive directly from the Finder) there were no other side effects. (There are other ways to transfer files between the Mac file system and Windows, including the use of Parallels Desktop's Shared Folders.)

Parallels has an article in their support forum describing workarounds for known problems. It has an entry describing a fix for this particular issue. It sounds kind of iffy to me—it involves installing a new version of MacFUSE and changing your Finder preferences to not display connected server icons on the desktop. (MacFUSE is a Google project apparently used as part of Parallels Desktop, which "implements a mechanism that makes it possible to implement a fully functional file system in a user-space program on Mac OS X".) Non-techie users are probably best off waiting for a formal product update from Parallels; there is apparently already a beta available.

I've refrained from installing Leopard on any of my other Macs yet. The iMac is currently being used for Celia's music projects for school, and I don't want to tinker with it yet. And I'm waiting to install it on the Mac Mini until I have lots of time to devote to that process. (It's our home server, and I have to be positive that our file sharing configurations will work correctly under Leopard. Plus, since I run it in headless mode, I'm pretty sure I need to connect a monitor, keyboard, and mouse to it before starting the upgrade.)