This issue was touched on a time or two in the MFI Forums, but I've thus far been unable to track down a relevant thread.
The basic issue is the failure of Finder to become frontmost when the Desktop is clicked on. It typically happens when I'm in a browser (either Camino 2.0.1 or Safari 4.0.4). I click on the Desktop, intending to make Finder active (say, to bring to the front an already-open Finder window). The browser window becomes dimmed, as expected, but no Finder window appears, and the browser menubar remains in place. I need to click on Finder's Dock icon to exit this no-active-app limbo. (I haven't had the presence of mind to try Command-Tabbing my way to Finder in such a case as yet.)
This phenomenon is unpredictable, and has persisted in its intermittent way over many months of running OS X 10.5, surviving system updates (I'm currently at 10.5.8), browser updates, and a whole range of activities thought by some to address inexplicable symptoms (disk repair, permissions repair, etc.). I should note that none of these activities were undertaken in response to this particular issue: first, because its intermittent nature makes evaluating the success of any proposed antidote problematic, but second, because it feels to me more like a bug in the OS whose conditions for reproducibility I have yet to understand.
Furthermore, though I haven't documented the occasions, my recollection is that the issue isn't confined to Finder; I believe that in at least a couple of instances, Activity Monitor refused to yield the menubar to Camino or Safari until the browser's Dock icon was clicked on. (Though my memory is hazy: it's possible that clicking on the Dock icon of the application which won't relinquish the menubar also works to break out of the limbo.) In any event, the general case is that clicking on another application's window (or the Dekstop, in the case of Finder) deactivates the current application without bringing the clicked-on application to the front.
It's not a big concern, but since I remember some discussion of the phenomenon having taken place at MFIF, I wondered if anyone else here running 10.5 has noticed anything similar.
