Mountain Lion - open lid, push first character of password, no response? keep trying again until asterisk appears, then type rest of password.

Where is that? I tried Spotlight searching for "automatically" and "networks" and couldn't find it.

My MacBook does this whenever some process runs away with all the CPU cycles, sometimes it takes ages to properly wake up and log in and sometimes it doesn't manage it at all.

The work-around is to SSH in from another machine and kill the process that's hogging the CPU. Your MacBook will spring back to life! (Assuming, as I said, that we are experiencing the same issue - I only know for sure that we are experiencing the same symptoms)

If this does prove to be the cause, if you know or suspect a process is going to use a lot of CPU, to keep the system stable and perky you can either launch it from the command-line with "nice", e.g.

$ nice ./some_beastly_script.pl

Or if the process is already running, you can "renice" it:

$ renice $PID

Both of these will give that process lower CPU priority, stopping it bogging down other things.

I've mean meaning to look into the possibility of making essential things like the screensaver / unlock / core OS bits have higher priority than anything else, I'll write it up if I figure anything out.

I also get a lot of graphical glitches (mostly in Safari).

    * iOS-like pinch/zoom
    * Quick access to bookmark bar bookmarks with Cmd-[0-9]
    * iCloud tabs (w/ Mobile Safari)
    * Reader
    * Better feedback on page back/forward gestures

* I don't really see the usefulness. I prefer Cmd-[0-9] for tab access.

* Chrome syncs between my three computers, phone, tablet. It's not just bookmarks. It's everything

* Doesn't Safari not have a reader anymore?

* I guess it's a matter of preference but I get a nice arrow indicator for page forward and backward. The Safari effect is a bit much in my opinion.

That's why I use Safari. I couldn't possibly live with Chrome even if Safari was worse that it - I absolutely hate the stupid download bar, or "Downloads/Preferences" not being standard windows but silly webpages. And don't get me started on custom contextual menus Chrome team thought were cooler than standard OS X menus (even if they were cooler, they're at least 5 times slower. So what's the point of them?)

That said, it all comes down to what your personal preferences are. The difference between browsers are not huge. Some like Safari, some like Chrome, and some like Lynx.

I don't know why he prefers the things he does, but I don't dispute that he may well feel that way, nor do I care that he does.

    * Chrome changes the font size; it doesn't zoom the page. At least in v22.
    * I don't see the usefulness in tab access. To each their own.
    * Chrome on iOS doesn't have access to Nitro.
    * Come again? Reader is the Safari feature adapted from Arc90's Readability bookmarklet.
    * Right.

The kicker, the copy of windows which I ran through Parallels could connect. I could surf sites and VPN through Windows in a VM while OS X applications could not, until I bounced the wireless connection.

I wrote it a long time ago, but maybe it will still give you (or others) leads to a solution. FWIW I haven't had any major wifi problems since the first or second Lion update.

Unfortunately, I've had all sorts of other, less intermittent issues with Mountain Lion. Finder is extremely sluggish (beachballing a LOT), sleep can be iffy, and will cut in while a Time Machine volume on network share is mounted, leaving it in an unclean state and wanting to delete all my backups (!!!) and start over. (I've thus far worked around it with a full fsck and deleting only the most recent snapshot and updating the plist file to reflect this, but that's not really a solution as it takes a few hours at a time to do the fsck over the network)

I'm also getting far worse battery life than before, as the system has 5-10% CPU utilisation when idle for no apparent reason.

I'm hoping these have improved with 10.8.1, otherwise I'll revert to Lion and think about switching back to Linux in the medium term...

[1] http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3964

"To fix this, I removed all the remembered locations and then in Configure Network Prefrences -> TCP/IP changed Configure IPV6 to Link-local only."

EDIT: It did seem to make things better for me, where after waking up from sleep it at least automatically reconnects, but it is still not same as Lion I think.d

But connection drops intermittently with me, not when waking from sleep.

And now I have this weird flickering cursor while typing in Mail.app

God I miss Snow Leopard.

I decided to try something I shouldn't have had to and bought an Airport Extreme.

No more issues. I've since sold the Cisco N router -- that had worked perfectly with every other wifi device in the house, including this same computer before Lion.

I bet people will continue to give this suggestion as an attempted fix to random problems long after all memory of what it was actually for will be lost (i.e. classic environment screwing with HFS+ extensions introduced by OS X).

I believe that "fix permissions" scans the installed package receipts and corrects the file permissions where necessary. In a world where any errant package install can mangle modes and ownership, fix permissions will not go derelict.

What it's actually for is the fixing of mangled permissions.

[1]: http://kb.parallels.com/en/113749

7" - maybe you should invest in an ethernet cable...