Man, you are totally right, paws. IGNORE ME! I guess I forgot "Yikes!". Maybe because it's an exclamation?

But yeah, since my brain no workie today (I'm moving again and doing internet stuff to stay sane and procrastinate a bit), we'll just totally disregard anything I said about the graphics subsystems and totally blame Leopard on this one.

My neurons fire well enough to keep that idea straight, anyway: Leopard is a hog, as others have noted (strength in numbers!), so I'd downgrade, especially considering your hardware. It's likely that you'll notice a HUGE improvement with Tiger. Or, just keep to OS 9 for all of your DV needs. Whichever works.