You're not seeing Safari taking up memory and freeing up next to none of it (both real and virtual)? Maybe it's the pages I'm loading. I notice especially how any activity on one tab can completely bring the whole browser to a standstill with a spinning beach ball such that you can't do anything in any other part of the program.

Closing the tab for the default Slim Center Interface can sometimes take 30 seconds or more.

I immediately noticed Safari response and hanging issues when I updated from the 3.0 beta to the final release. Every update since then hasn't been much better. At least most of the issues that resulted in some pages producing an error have been eliminated - The error wasn't a page issue because if you reloaded 3 or 4 times you'd get the page. A lot of people had that problem as it's documented up and down the net, I just can't remember what the error was right now.

With Mail it's not anything specific from what I can tell. It can just crash while sitting there. It's done this since I first installed Leopard, though not on any type of regular schedule. Mail also takes longer in Leopard to show folder contents. Of course it can crash when I'm closing a message composition window, or even just switching folders.

I have no doubt this Leopard install is completely bunged, but that's a Leopard thing, not an issue with my hardware/system. Repair permissions took 30 hours when I last did it 3 weeks ago.

Ideally I'd like to buy a new Intel machine and then install Tiger on this one. While my Intel mini doesn't see the kind of use as this PowerBook, I've never experienced a crash running Leopard on it. Just have to put up with the same smaller bugs and design issues.