Spaces sucks. For a good variety of reasons which you can read elsewhere or probably have noticed yourself if you have used any other virtual desktop application before.

Which is why I want my VirtueDesktops back, even though the development has been discontinued in favour of Spaces. Unluckily, by default it does the following on Leopard:

trinidad:~ klink$ /Users/Shared/Applications/VirtueDesktops.app/Contents/MacOS/VirtueDesktops 
dyld: Library not loaded: @executable_path/../Frameworks/TAUserInterfaceElements.framework/Versions/A/TAUserInterfaceElements
  Referenced from: /Users/Shared/Applications/VirtueDesktops.app/Contents/MacOS/VirtueDesktops
  Reason: unsafe use of @executable_path in /Users/Shared/Applications/VirtueDesktops.app/Contents/MacOS/VirtueDesktops with setuid binary
Trace/BPT trap

Luckily, there is a quick hack around that: start it as root. Not exactly the nicest solution, but it helps, and I am pretty happy it does. Here is the walk-through:

trinidad:~ klink$ sudo su
Password:
sh-3.2# mkdir -p Library/Application\ Support 
sh-3.2# cp -r ~klink/Library/Application\ Support/VirtueDesktops Library/Application\ Support/
sh-3.2# /Users/Shared/Applications/VirtueDesktops.app/Contents/MacOS/VirtueDesktops &
sh-3.2# exit

You may of course need to tweak a few paths here and there (~klink and /Users/Shared/Applications/ might not exist on your system).