[Editor's note: The cause and solution have been identified - see the comments for details!]

For a while now, I have been having a problem with the PDF compositor that comes with OSX public beta. What happens is whenever I open it, I get an unusually large window where half of it is filled with a weird pink/purple color wth the other half being those OSX stripes and it won't let me do anything except quit. any help would be appreciated. thanks.

If you find that a downloaded package is not behaving as expected, and you used IE under OS X, check the filename.

For some reason (OS 9 legacy would be my guess), downloaded filenames are truncated to 31 characters. As a result, downloaded files may not be expanded as you expect.

For example, WebGrabber from Epicware, is named "WebGrabber.app.0.4.DP4.gnutar.gz" on their website. However, after downloading in IE, the download manager shows the name as "WebGrabber.app.0.4.DP4.gnutar.g".

I had to rename the file to add the "z" back in the terminal, and then was able to use OpenUp to expand the download as usual. Without renaming, though, even File -> Open from within OpenUp couldn't see the file.

Weird...

This issue arose due to a problem that drboss discussed in a MacFixIt forum; see the link in the comments for the whole story.

Terminal windows can be made transparent simply by typing the following text at the command line:

defaults write com.apple.terminal TerminalOpaqueness '0.85'

The amount of transparency can be adjusted by using values between 0 and 1 (with 1 being completely opaque).

You will need to open a new terminal window to see the result.