The Finder is a Carbon app, so Morgan is correct to classify Carbon apps as full citizens of Mac OS X.

Carbon is the OS X implementation of the Mac OS 9 APIs which are consistent with the runtime environment of OS X and which Apple had the time to move forward. Carbon apps don't take advantage of the Next Step framework and Objective C.

CarbonLib is a library which allows an application written to the Carbon API for OS X to run on OS 8.6 to 9.x. It adds some to the memory requirements, and for a while significantly added to the instability of an application, but Apple beat down most of those bugs, or provided work arounds.

Carbon helped us clear a bunch of bugs out of Internet Explorer, so Carbonizing an application can really help the OS 9 version if you do it right (hence the release of IE 5.1 for OS 8/9, which doesn't require CarbonLib).

I've got iMac and I've found that if you turn the "Energy Saver" off the starfish comes up on the glass often.

Is there any news on fixing this bug? I'd really like my starfish to get up off his lazy butt and climb around more, and stay up there when he finally does climb. I was hoping this would be fixed by now. What's going on?

No news. However, that doesn't mean nothing is happening.