The issue with sorting, re: upper/lower case characters, is likely to be a locale issue.

Hmm... I never thought of that. That'd explain why the linux machines at work have that annoying tendancy, as well. I'll have to check into that, though I doubt I'd be able to convince them to switch -- they only just now took '.' off the front of the path, and that was only because it was clobbering the database of our asset management filesystem anytime someone did an 'ls'.