you're welcome--I was just passing through and happened to notice your post.
Re the repair perms--I've had no troubles provided I avoided repairing from the CD or a remote volume (I was burnt once repairing another computer in Target disk mode via firewire). I just restart into safe boot mode, repair perms using Disk Utility from the same partition to be checked, and all is good. In fact, I make this a standard practise after any install. http://www.macattorney.com/tutorial.html (this is a pretty good OSX troubleshooting page) recommends permission repair as the most basic maintenance step for Jaguar.

Hope this helps--cheers