Unlike some folks who upgraded to Leopard at the end of October, I've had pretty good luck with Apple's new OS. No blue screen of death when I updated from Tiger; no dead keyboards on my MacBook Pro (MBP). No ability to keep a solid WiFi connection.
Oh, wait. That last one actually is turning out to be a problem, and not just for me. Check out the various threads on Apple's own support forums, where everyone seems to be trying to figure out the same thing: Why do WiFi connections between Apple's Airport base station and the company's laptops keep dropping -- especially when using Leopard?
Here's what happened to me. After a month or so of problem-free surfing, I awakened my MBP from sleep and noticed it wasn't finding my home WiFi network. The laptop was bought in June and is the latest model available: a 17-incher with the 2.4GHz Core2Duo processor; The base station was bought in August. Both offer WiFi networking using the still-evolving-but-almost-complete 802.11n draft standard, and both worked just fine until earlier this week.
I restarted the laptop; no WiFi. I turned off WiFi on the laptop and turned it back on. No go. I opened up the network system pref pane and poked around, but found nothing out of miss. So I pulled the plug on the base station to restart it and voila! my connection was back.
I sat the computer down, closed the lid, made dinner and came back to find when I awakened the MBP that my connection -- you got it -- was gone again. This time, I was able to get a connection by restarting the laptop, but over the next day or so, the problem occurred often enough that I tried my older 802.11n-based Linksys wireless router. That one was consistent: every time I put my laptop to sleep the connection died.
Next stop: Those Apple discussion forums, where users facing similar problems offered a plethora of solutions, everything from reducing signal strength to turning off IPv6 addressing on both the router and laptop to -- my fav -- sitting the Airport Extreme Base Station on its side. The thread I checked out had more than 2,800 views and more than 230 posts as of late afternoon on Dec. 6.
I am not alone.
I opted to kill IPv6, which several users said had worked for them, at least for a while. You do this on the Airport Extreme Base Station by using "manual setup" in the utility that manages the base station, going to advanced>IPv6 and making IPv6 "Local-link only." I also turned it off using the Network preferences pane on the laptop itself. This is not a guaranteed solution. After a few days, all I can say is so far, so good. But I hold my breath a bit every time I sit down to use my laptop wondering how long this "fix" will last.
My advice to Apple? Do what one user said: Tell your engineers to stop playing with their iPhones and iPods and get this problem solved.