I encountered a problem with Leopard on the new Macbook, to wit the Special Characters palette did not appear in any of the three iWorks functions or mail.  Always encouraging when something does not work consistently, shows the design is sound!  either way last night I went onto the Apple support site and proposed the problem and by this morning someone had posted the solution.  In the old days I would have phoned up a support line, described the problem, got a reference number (you know the saga.  Either way my thanks to Tom who from his 12,600 posts has helped a lot of people over the years.