I have found another feature of Leopard I don't understand. Take a text file (like an RTF file from TextEdit).
Put it on your desktop. View the desktop and you'll see a quite fussy icon just like you'd see in Tiger. Copy the file and put it in your Documents folder then open that in Finder, the icon for the file is completely different - the new style washed out document outline.
View the Desktop through Finder, and if you watch very carefully, the first time you open the folder you'll see the old style icon immediately replaced by the new style one. After that first folder open it stays as the new style.
???
Put it on your desktop. View the desktop and you'll see a quite fussy icon just like you'd see in Tiger. Copy the file and put it in your Documents folder then open that in Finder, the icon for the file is completely different - the new style washed out document outline.
View the Desktop through Finder, and if you watch very carefully, the first time you open the folder you'll see the old style icon immediately replaced by the new style one. After that first folder open it stays as the new style.
???