By Prince McLean

Published: 02:25 PM EST

Apple this week provided its vast developer community with new pre-release builds of its upcoming Mac OS X 10.4.11 Update, expected to be the company's final revision to the Tiger operating system ahead of Leopard's October launch.

According to a person familiar with the matter, the new builds -- labeled Mac OS X 10.4.11 build 8S2151 (for Intel Macs) and Mac OS X 10.4.11 build 8S151 (for PowerPC Macs) -- address a handful known issues, in particular those relating to system hangs when unmounting NFS volumes and copying files over a network.

When combined with those from previous seeds, fixes from the latest builds bring the total number of code corrections in Mac OS X 10.4.11 to well over three dozen.

Among the other system components that have already seen improvements via previous builds are: WebCore, SearchKit, BlueTooth (enabling/disabling), Networking and Cisco VPN, Directory Services, CoreAudio and m4a files, File Manager and POSIX volumes, and CoreAudio and decoding iTunes Plus files.

Of the two separate distributions of Mac OS X 10.4.11 Update, only the Intel version is reportedly hampered by a known issues. A single FireWire bug exists in that version that could prevent drives from mounting, a person familiar with the software has said.

In Delta form, Mac OS X 10.4.11 currently weighs in as 65MB disc image for PowerPC Macs and a 119MB disc image for Intel Macs. The software is expected to see a release sometime this month or early next.