Multiple issues with Leopard (Network, Pages, iPhoto, iTunes, General)

Question

It's been so much fun.
I have 3 macs right now, per my profile.
I started updating the G4 because it's the experimental system, the MacPro is production, and the MacBook is for the kids and for me to wander the domain and still be productive. These Macs and some other things sit behind a Linux/iptables firewall.
1st issue: After updating the G4 certain web sites have been inaccessible, including just about any apple sites behind SSL, ADC, iTunes Music Store, iPhoto Store (calendars, books), Network Solutions, Newegg, etc. However, as of 10.4.11 on the other 2 Macs, 10.5.1 and 10.4.11 had parity, or close to it, in networking.
2nd issue: The other problem I had right off the bat was remote printing to the MacPro which has an Epson Stylus Photo printer hooked up. At the time this was first noticed, the MacPro was 10.4.11 and the computer I was attempting to print from was 10.5.1. I erroneously thought that had to do with the disparity on OS versions. Not so. The result of trying to print anything to the remote printer is the immediate cratering of the app you're printing from, Safari, Pages, Firefox, Preview. I can reproduce this at will.
3rd issue: Straight from the previous 2 issues, I can't log any problem reports. This is frustrating.
I initially didn't see the problems that I saw a lot of people registering on here, other than the ones I noted above, and as far as the networking thing went, 10.4.11 and 10.5.1 were equally cr*y. So, I bit the bullet and upgraded several things, iLife '08 (which I couldn't adequately check out on the G4), iWork '08 which I hadn't had any problems with, and Leopard on the remain 2 macs.
Issue 1 was, as expected, no better or worse, and more and more talked about on these discussions. I thing that helped, notably to allow me to finally login to the discussions, rather than just read them, was:
sysctl -w net.inet.tcp.pathmtudiscovery=0
Thanks to mreckhof for that little gem
This helped with the login here, but didn't help with anything else. And in retrospect, 10.5.1 is much worse then 10.4.1 as far as the networking goes. When/if I expose the mac by putting it outside the firewall, it's actually much much worse than it used to be. There are several places where any of the Macs directly connected to the internet are completely useless for talking to websites, DNS, and other things. The web site problem is that more than a handful don't load. Most of these make heavy use of akamai, as apple does. The Linux Firewall and exposed Linux desktops don't have this problem.
Right now, I can't buy or use a few of the bought things from iTunes Music Store. I could not order calendars from iPhoto, which shot holes in several of our holiday gifts to friends and relatives. I can't purchase or update several things with other online vendors from the mac, where I would usually do such things. There is a veritable litany of things, real monetary that I also can't do to earn money as well now that we've upgraded, but I'll get to that.
Issue 2 and issue 3 were unchanged.
4th Issue: iPhoto lost, on import, several photos and movies. This happened just recently. Currently the iPhoto library has around 30,000 photos and videos in it spanning the last several years. it's around 500GB. The problem was that after the import was "done" and it was cleaning off the memory card, it crashed. The imported items were not successfully imported, that I can find, and the memory card was successfully cleaned off. The images and movies appear to be lost completely. The problem is that we derive some of our income from the picture. There backed up in 2 different ways, but we have to be able to trust that they'll arrive safely for the backup to work. I'm rethinking that. I can't trust I photo so memory cards are filling up.
But I thought we still could do things with iPhoto with what is there. Woe is me.
Issue 5: Using Pages 3.0.1, and dragging photos from iPhoto to it, something that has brought good success in the past, and produced some great results, stopped working reliably, in a big way.
The document in question is about 80 pages long and contains a couple hundred photos, dragged and dropped from iPhoto. On or around page 62, Pages started throwing up a "Image file ****.jpg is corrupt and cannot be used, all other photos already imported blah, blah, blah." I'm paraphrasing at the moment because 1) Pages crashes, when you're lucky, soon after this and 2) when you're not lucky, the whole computer freezes in a non-recoverable way. The system log is littered with:
2008/01/07 23:00:17 Pages[173] Pages(173,0xa0748f60) malloc: * mmap(size=3051520) failed (error code=12)
* error: can't allocate region
* set a breakpoint in mallocerrorbreak to debug
2008/01/07 23:00:16 Pages[173] CGContextSetShouldSmoothFonts: invalid context
2008/01/07 23:00:17 Pages[173] CGContextConcatCTM: invalid context
2008/01/07 23:00:17 Pages[173] CGContextConcatCTM: invalid context
2008/01/07 23:00:17 Pages[173] CGContextSetFlatness: invalid context
2008/01/07 23:00:17 Pages[173] CGContextRestoreGState: invalid context
2008/01/07 23:00:17 Pages[173] CGContextScaleCTM: invalid context
2008/01/07 23:00:17 Pages[173] CGContextClearRect: invalid context
2008/01/07 23:00:17 Pages[173] CGContextSetLineCap: invalid context
2008/01/07 23:00:17 Pages[173] CGContextAddLineToPoint: invalid context
2008/01/07 23:00:17 Pages[173] CGBitmapContextInfoCreate: unable to allocate 3047424 bytes for bitmap data
2008/01/07 23:00:17 Pages[173] CGContextTranslateCTM: invalid context
2008/01/07 23:00:17 Pages[173] CGContextSaveGState: invalid context
2008/01/07 23:00:17 Pages[173] CGContextSetFlatness: invalid context
2008/01/07 23:00:17 Pages[173] CGContextRestoreGState: invalid context
2008/01/07 23:00:17 Pages[173] CGContextScaleCTM: invalid context
2008/01/07 23:00:17 Pages[173] CGContextClearRect: invalid context
There were around 100 instance of the above error in at the same timestamp.
I'm not sure where it's trying to malloc this from, but the machine has 8GB of physical ram and plenty of space for swap. It normally reports 34GB of VM and when pages is started, 6+GB of real ram is available to it.
And the image isn't corrupt. I'm able to start a fresh document up and put a few pictures into it.
I am unable to cut and paste, use the media browser or otherwise to add more than an image at a time into the document. The same is, I still have the old pages around, and we had done a very similar thing with it, several times, but this one was started with 3.0.1 and saved as a 3.0.1 document. The amount of time put into it, at this point, is non-trivial.
When things go very badly, iPhoto and Pages conspire together to lock the computer up wholly and completely. I'm unable to kill Pages, at all, from the command line. I have been able to kill iPhoto from the command line, but it doesn't change anything, and I really hate to do it. If I issue a shutdown from the command line, it doesn't something is preventing us from getting a clean shutdown.
And I've had varying degrees of success registering my products, but they're all recent purchases and I've got serial numbers that appear to all them to work even if I'm unable to send in the registration over the internet. They're family versions.
Issue 6: Now that frequent hard restarts, I have mds and mdworker tacking up several CPUs on restart for an extended period of time. I've never been able to get any clarification on what these 2 processes do, but they keep my from doing anything useful for a good long period of time. Looking at the process listing, they appear to be in the MetaDataService suite of OSX apps, and that's about all I've been able to determine looking at man pages and several searches of apple sites.
Issue 7: Only on the G4 Mac, periodically I'll get the gray overlay of "You must restart your computer now." The thing is, things still appear to work somewhat, and what I've been able to see is that one of the CPUs appears to be offline in the activity monitor, which I always have up. I'm able to quit cleanly, AFAIK, out of most of the things I have running, but can't issue a normal shutdown, always requires hard reset (power button for 8 seconds or whatever the timeframe). spindump appears to be the culprit, or instigator. The CPU going offline is troubling. Not sure if I have a CPU going bad or a software problem with an app. The logs are riddled with all kinds of errors, but nothing indicative of what the problem is in fact.
This probably won't all post, and I don't expect everyone to take a stab at any and all of the issues. Just a less than gruntled user, and long time supporter, less than impressed lately. The features are big sellers and instigated a lot of the upgrade. For instance, I love spaces, some of the new themes in iDVD, and a lot of other things. I could do without the instability.

Answer 1

Oh, well that was a whole other kettle of fish:
Oh the G4 I attempted to install iLife '08 before Lepoard was available. About the only thing that installed cleanly was iPhoto. I ended up reinstalling everything back to iLife '06, and then upgrading back to the current stable version of the iLife '06 version. I didn't attempt a reinstall until after I upgraded to Leopard.
When I did reinstall, I made a iLife '06 folder, copied all iLife apps into it, and upgraded. Seemed to work, except for the part where iMovie gets left behind and iDVD is only mostly functional.
When I installed on the other 2 machines, it was after installing Leopard and all upgrades. On those 2 machines, I didn't bother with the copy, I just moved everything to the iLife '06 folder I created, and did a fresh install.
I didn't have to do anything with the iPhoto Libraries, that I can recall.
I always do an upgrade, never an archive and install. I've never had a problem with this back to 10.1 or 10.2.