Jason,

I bought my ex-girlfriend a MacBook Air for our wedding anniversary.

Recently it has started long slowdowns showing SBOD, requiring a Force Quit of Mail, and other slowdowns that made me re-start the computer for the first time in 3 months.

She told me "Even though it sometimes slows down, it is much better than my old (Windows) laptop. I really love this computer."

FYI, I originally set it up so that she could run Windows XP, but I didn't find any Anti-virus software and it is so aggressive in searching for open networks, even with Windows, I was scared that it would get zombied. Anyway, she started working with it using Leopard, even went to some free lessons at the Apple Store, so she's never ever used the Windows side.

So, we installed the latest firmware update , sometime yesterday. I was a bit surprised at how soon my wife was back on the computer with no comments or problems. She stopped receiving emails this morning, even though she could receive and reply to a test message from me this evening. Hitting "Get Mail" , or its Japanese equivalent, didn't produce any results. We tried this several times. Then I noticed that the Menu bar clock was showing a time roughly two hours, or maybe 26 hours, earlier. Opening up the clock control panel directly from this Menu bar clock showed that it was set to sync. to Apple.Asia, and instantly the clock updated itself.

Going back to Mail and hitting "Get Mail" again immediately produced a day's worth of messages. Since then, no problems, but I am left curious, is this a serious glitch, a temporary hiccough caused by the firmware update or is Leopard so clever that if it thinks it's now yesterday it won't reveal your today's messages until it thinks it is now tomorrow?