After spending a couple of days with Lion, the latest version of Mac OS X, I’ve gone through several phases. First, I was excited just to be poking around in a new operating system. Then, I was frustrated because I kept running into incompatibilities and glitches. Finally, I reached acceptance, which began the process of really settling in with OS X 10.7.

At this point, I can say that I like Lion, and I’m very intrigued by the design decisions Apple’s made in trying to blend iOS features into the Mac OS. For the most part, Apple has succeeded.

As is the case with any OS upgrade, and regardless of the platform, there have been some problems. I couldn’t get Lion’s Mail app – with its much-vaunted threaded conversations and revamped interface – to load because the program hung at “Preparing to import messages”. Removing the Mail folder from the ~/Library folder solved that problem.

Several programs won’t work at all because they require Rosetta – which lets PowerPC-based OS X programs run on Intel-based Macs – is not longer included. Among them: the software that pulls movies off the popular Flip video recorders.

And, as I wrote in the launch-day post, I had to uninstall an antivirus program because it was blocking access to all websites except for Gmail.

But, for the most part, I am fairly happy with Lion on my 13-inch MacBook Pro. I like features such as Mission Control, which gives you a slick overview of every program running on your Mac, along with all of your Spaces virtual desktops.

Lion brings quite a few changes to OS X, some of which are subtle and others that are jarring. Fortunately, in almost all these cases, you can undo the changes and make them more palatable. Here’s a list of some of the things you can do to make Lion less annoying.

• Revert to traditional scrolling. Lion changes the way mice and trackpads scroll to match the way scrolling works in iOS. On a touch screen, you flick your finger up to make a page move up, and down to move it down. But scrolling is reversed on a traditional computer because it’s usually done via a mouse wheel. Apple calls its new approach “Natural Scrolling”, but if you’ve been doing it the other way for years switching feels anything but natural.

You can change this in the System Preferences by going to either the Mouse or Trackpad panes, selecting the Scroll & Zoom tab and unchecking the “Scroll direction: natural” box.

However, I’d suggest giving this some time, particularly if you have a touchscreen smartphone or tablet. I find myself using the “natural” scrolling on my MacBook Pro’s trackpad, but preferring the traditional scrolling style when using a Magic Mouse.

• Turn on the lights. I’ve read that some of the MacBook Airs that come with Lion no longer have the familiar blue lights that appeared under running programs in the Dock in Leopard and Snow Leopard. However, in both my MacBook Pro upgrade and on a new MacBook Air, the lights were on. If they’re off for you, go to the Dock pane in System Preferences and check the “Show indicator lights for open applications”.

• Restore your path. One of the first things I do when I set up a new Mac is to turn on the Path Bar. This places a bar at the bottom of each finder window that displays your location in the current path. For some reason, the upgrade installation of Lion doesn’t honor this setting and turns it off. It also turns off the Status Bar, which shows you the number of objects in a folder and the amount of free disk space. You can turn both of these on by bringing up the Finder window, then clicking on View and Show Path Bar and Show Status Bar.

• Separate work and pleasure. iChat, Apple’s instant messaging client, can handle multiple chat systems. I use both Google’s Gtalk (a version of the Jabber protocol) and AIM with iChat. In Snow Leopard, each chat type had its own window, but in Lion, they’re blended together. Yeah, some folks may like one window for the sake of simplicity, but since I use AIM for work and Gtalk for personal chat, I like to keep them separate. To go back to individual windows for each service, go to iChat Preferences and in the General tab, uncheck the “Show all my accounts in one list” box.

• Disable auto-correct. One unheralded feature Apple’s brought to OS X from iOS is auto-correct. The operating system has the ability to correct your spelling, which every iPhone user knows can lead to both hilarity and humiliation. Turn this off by going to the Language & Text pane in System Preferences, clicking the Text tab and then unchecking the “Correct spelling automatically” box.

If you’ve installed Lion and found some ways to ease annoyances, leave your tips in the comments.