Mac OS 10.3, user profile corrupting.

[thingy]

Got some new G5's running OS10.3. One's running perfectly, no wuckers. The other one, well, not even a minute ago I had a call from the user saying "it's happened again".

Basically, her account profile is corrupting, so when she double-clicks on anything on her desktop we get a window pop up that looks like it's the authentication screen but has absolutely nothing in it, and the mouse turns into the beachball. I've left it for 15 minutes to no avail.

Yesterday morning I simply copied her profile to a different spot, changed the permissions so I could access everything from the admin account, trashed her account and re-created it.

Disk Doctor (or at least hte version that comes with the OS) can't find any problems, and repairing the permissions does nothing.

Anyone have any ideas as to why this is happening and how I can stop it?

[locust]

Hrmm, what do you mean by "her profile"?

It might be worth blowing away individual things and seeing what makes it work again. ~/Library is where all the stuff that could go wrong is - basically preferences and also stuff like per-user fonts, plugins etc.

The only time I saw anything like this was when I backed up and restored ~ using "tar" from the command line - turns out a lot of the UNIXy stuff won't preserve the resource forks that MacOS still uses, so stuff broke when I tried to use it.

[thingy]

I haven't had time to do that. I know she's customised it and shit - if it happens again I'll force her to recustomise while I sit there to ensure she reboots after every change so I can see what it is that keeps doing this.

If I have time, of course.

[saige]

You called also trash the finder and copy it again from a back up (if you have one that is). Although it's better in X it's still a bit iffy.

It might be a silly question, but have you set the permissions correctly? I know I muffed it the first few times I did it. You can also try wiping the system cache.

Could be a system preference problem if it happens consistantly even after trashing the stuffed account. But then it could also be the user. ;)

[mrsatantoyou]

Definately sounds like permissions, boot from CD and fix the permissions, I had that kinda problem when a user changed the name of the home account, if that doesn't work -->

A quick way to do a reinstall is to move (and back up) the System, Library and Users account then reinstall from the CD, you can copy the prefs back from the Users:<Users Name>:Library:Preferences folder, then run Software Update, then you want to take away the persons admin permissions, cause it's a lot easier to fuck OS X then OS 9.

Batchmod is a good app for quickly changing permissions, see versiontracker.com.

Cheers, paul