renaming files in OS X Snow Leopard with illegal chars..

I'm still using Leopard but want to know if the behavior of renaming files is on par of that in, gasp, Windows Vista. I was jsut doing a lot of renaming and it reminded me of the days I used to use Vista when renaming a file and using an 'illegal' character it would pop-up a yellow dialog (not an error window) to remind me of the characters I can use only.

In OS X Leopard 10.5x if I try to use e.g. ":" I get an error box and this then reverts the file back to its original name which erases all of what I had done, all for one char probably. On top of this the error box then gives me a cryptic message as to what the error was about:


"The name "xxxxx" cannot be used.

Try using another name, with fewer characters or no punctuation marks."


I heard that the guys working on OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard tidied everything up, doing all those things they always wanted to do, I bet they didn't get many opportunities like that! And was hoping that they did something toward file rename?

I'd expect that the erroneous char would be highlighted and some kind of error shown, but not to delete everything typed in. Can anybody tell me?

Thanks.