[dice]

I did a full clean install onto a new () 120gb harddisk, and I installed all the updates in Software update, so i am running 10.3.3. Then I noticed that my short user name was "joebloggs" instead of just "joe". So I created a new user with admin priveleges and used it to delete the original user. I now have one user.

The first problem that I noticed was that I couldn't create a folder in the Applications folder even though "get info" said I had read and write priveleges, I changed the owner from System to myself and it seemed to fix it. I also repaired the priveleges but it didn't find anything out of the ordinary. Just now I went to update Toast and it's installer told me that I didn't have sufficient priveleges .

So why does my user differ from the original (deleted) user?

thanks for your help.

[pat++]

Because the user id is not the same (I guess), although it should work.... I guess the simpliest thing to do is recreate a user with the initial setup assistant :

- boot into single user mode (hold command-S during startup)
- type :

mount -uw /

- delete all existing users and home directories with :

rm -rf /var/db/netinfo /Users/joe*
rm -f /var/db/.AppleSetupDone

- make sure /Applications and /System do have the right permissions :

chown root:admin /Applications
chmod 775 /Applications
chown root:wheel /System
chmod 755 /System

- and reboot, the assistant will let you create the initial user,
- then run Disk Utility and Fix permissions just to make sure everything is OK

[dice]

Thanks for the reply, but I already went to the extreme and did and archive and install, only took an hour or so to get it back to it's original state cos I hadn't copied any of my files onto the new drive yet... I know it was overkill and I wouldn't have done it if I had had it all fully set up.

Seems to be working ok now.