[urban]

Hello, my friend just bought an iBook G4 and her ibook is behaving improperly. After she shuts down her computer and turns it on again, her wallpaper and docked items disappear. What's there to do to diagnose the problem?
btw, if it matters, she bought it open-boxed.
Thank you very much.

[cybergoober]

Sounds like her ~/Library/Preferences folder does not "belong" to her. Have her go to her Preferences folder and Get Info (⌘-I) then note what it says for Owner under the Ownership and Permissions section. It's entirely possible her entire home folder might not belong to her. If she has admin privileges she should be able to change the permissions and make herself the owner. Might be quicker to have her try in Terminal (we'll call her Sue in this example):

Code:
chown -R sue /Users/sue

This will make Sue the owner of every file and/or folder in her home folder. Then have her log out then log back in. Change the Desktop Background and/or some Dock items then log out and back in again. The changes should stick now.

[TETENAL]

Since it is still new I would suggest she reinstalls the operating system with reformating the whole drive. That will make sure the system is in proper condition. (Don't forget to then also install the bundled software from the system restore CD.)