Good morning all. Got kind of a weird problem with multiple users under 9.0.4. I had to reinstall OS9 this weekend and now it appears that each user (aside from me the owner) can't set any desktop preferences such as resolution, appearance theme, and view preferences; it always goes back to the owners settings and in the case of view preferences, goes back to default.

Before I reinstalled I had two accounts aside from my own. One for my wife and one for a guest. Each had their own desktop picture and resolution (she really doesn't like the 1280 X 1024 I run at) and appearance theme. Now every account I setup defaults to my appearance theme, resolution and desktop and won't hold any changes; next time you log in, it goes back to my settings.

So what have I tried. Reinstalled the 9.0.4 update, trashed the multiple users preferences, deleted the previous user accounts and user folder, disabled and re-enabled multiple users. Before reinstalling I moved my previous system folder to another drive in my G3 and I've even moved all preferences/extensions/user folders from the old to the new. From what I can see each user has a preferences folder under their account in the users folder. If I trash the display preferences in this folder and then re-login it will not come back. I don't think this is normal but then again I've never had to do this before.

Any suggestions on what to try next?

[crazycylon]

I had a similar problem. Here is what I did. After reinstalling 9.0.4, I set up new accounts. After testing that it would hold settings, I dragged the old preferences etc over. In your system preferences there should be a users & groups data file. If there is no data file the setting that each user sets will revert back to the default setting that the owner uses.

I hope this help.

[This message has been edited by crazycylon (edited 10-09-2000).]

[Paul Crawford]

Hi all,

To crazycylon, my aplogies for missing this thread before, but I wanted to ask if you were certain about the 'Users & Groups Data File' prefs-file... Isn't that used for File Sharing, rather than Multiple Users (MU)?

I've recently stumbled upon a related issue in terms of a different MU-specific prefs-file ('User Prefs') that's being misused by recent versions of MU (e.g., MU 1.3). [See my long-overdue post of today ('01-19-2001 01:48 PM') in an ancient Multiple user problems thread in this Forum.]

I was wondering if you or anyone else knows of any other MU-specific prefs-files that might be relevant to MU's smooth functioning? It might be worthwhile for us to try to find a temporary, but solid, workaround for various MU issues ("lost" Appearance settings, "shy" control strip, etc.), while we wait for Apple to release the next MU update.

Regards,

--Paul