I haven't been able to find the problem with 10.2.8. It only happens on some systems and naturally none of mine had a problem. It appears to be a bad preference that's at fault. A user I was working with to fix it removed all the prefs from ~/Library/Preferences. BackLight then worked correctly. He then added each one back in one by one and tested BackLight after each addition. Unfortunately, he added them all back in without the problem happening again. So we weren't able to find the faulty one. If I had to guess, I would try the screen effects preference that is in the ByHosts folder.

As for Panther, right now there are a bunch of issues with BackLight conflicting with Expose and hot-keys. I'm looking for a way to fix the conflict. Hopefully it'll be something relatively easy, but I don't know when it will be coming.

Thanks