[unboggling]

Kovid, thanks for responding by email to my launchpad report. I agree it may be something specific to my calibre install, or specific to my system. Those possibilities gain credence from the apparent lack of report of the issue by other users of calibre/OS X.

Like I said, it's a minor thing. But curious, and thinking of it as a learning experience, I started with a clean new-user install (calibre found no pre-existing configuration directory at startup). Then I investigated the configuration directory files, various settings, and interrelationships between them, replacing the configuration directory with a clean one after identifying a problem, to try to keep the variables as isolated as possible. This involved lots of replacement of configuration directory, and lots of installs of different version, and lots of restarts. There are at least four variables involved, not always the same ones in the cases of version-first-launch or changed-book-details-field.

I won't bore anyone with the specific details about the variables and the testing regimen, because no one else has reported experiencing the row-size-discrepancy issue. But if any other calibre users on OS X are experiencing it too, I would be very interested to hear about it. Because then we could figure out what we do in common that is rarely done by other people, to help identify the primary causative factor.

I can avoid both cases of row-size-discrepancy by (1) having never changed font from the original Helvetica 13 with the current configuration directory and not changing font now, and (2) having never had Find Duplicates plugin installed in the current configuration directory and not installing it now. But I'd rather an extra restart once a week for the version change and an occasional extra restart for a changed field in Book Details, than to never change font, never change Book Details, and never use Find Duplicates.