As a mac tech at a company with just under 200 macs on hand, I can swear by the bacon-saving goodness that is DiskWarrior.

Coming from the PC side, I, too, was puzzled at first as to why Macs seem to have such a fragile directory system that ends up needing DiskWarrior run over it on such a regular basis to cure a variety of oddball ills (especially when all it says is that it repaired some custom icons, and yet the problem at hand is magically fixed... WTF?). What I have come to realize is this. The sort of directory damage DiskWarrior fixes, and which Apple's HFS filesystem seems to prone to suffer, never happens under NTFS. My smug sense of PC-superiority disappeared the next time I had some disk corruption occur on a PC which destroyed the Windows directory, requiring a wipe and a full reload of the system. And another time when directory corruption took out the entire My Documents folder, with no recoverable files.

I realized that, while data corruption seems a lot more rare on a somewhat more robust NTFS file system, when it happens, it can be catastrophic. On a Mac, when it happens, DiskWarrior fixes it perfectly better than 99 times out of 100. In short, both systems can have problems, but while the problems happen more on the Macs, the severity of the problem is FAR less than when these things happen on a PC.

This has been my experience accross the board with Macs... Neither platform is perfect, but Macs tend to be easier to fix and troubleshoot than PCs. I rarely have to completely wipe and reload a Mac from scratch. PCs, depending on the problem, are frequently easier to simply wipe and reload than dig down through obscure registry settings to fix. I can do it when needed, of course, but the complexity of Win2k-XP has reached the sad point that it is often just plain faster easier to wipe and reinstall than spend a big chunk of time troubleshooting.

Sorry about the sidetrack. DiskWarrior. If you own a Mac, just buy a copy. Use it every few months as a preventative, and your Mac will thank you. :-) Between running DW and repairing permissions on a semi-regular basis, your Mac will likely keep humming happily for a good long time...