For all of you complaining about instabilities in the OS releases, do note that sometimes it is RAM that's the issue, not just the OS rev. We've found many cases where RAM would function in OS 9 but not OS X (any 10 release) on iMacs, G3s and G4s. Often, we see there 10.2 would install, but no updater would -- until the RAM was replaced, then the machine was fine with the updater.

We have bondi blue imac 233 running 10.2.6 just fine, but can't accept 10.2.8 (I'm not interested in replacing the DIMMs -- so will never worry about moving up on that machine).

So do some exploring -- RAM is programmed at the manufacturer, and their version of firmware/eprom can make for compatibility issues if not done right.