Srange problem in Mountain Lion

I have a late 2011 MacBook Pro. I was having trouble with real player, so I decided to set up another administrator account, moved my home folder files there and deleted the old account.

Now, I have been having issues where the ML is going back to previous settings. For example, I had natural scrolling disabled and xmarks installed for bookmarks, but when I restart the system, the natural scrolling is enabled again and xmarks are gone from the menu in Firefox. Also, I didn't want my name showing up on the quick user switch icon on Finder, but it always switches back to my home folder name for the user context menu where one can switch to different user names.

I have done the smc reset (just in case) and deleted the cache in libray and system folders as well as deleted the .plist files in preferences, so what other options do I have left? I want to try them before I take it to the apple store to do a complete wipe and restore of the system.


PS I know that in the apple store, they wipe out the whole drive including the recovery partition. Is there a way that I could install ML from a usb drive without reformatting the recovery drive? Apple should have put a basic version of the OS in recovery drive like Windows does because it is impossible to download 4.7 GB+ of ML each time if you have to do a reset.

 

Your new account has a different user ID than the old one. When you copied your home directory, all the files in it were owned by your previous user ID, so now you may be experiencing file permissions issues. Perhaps try 'chown -R your_new_userid ~' (after you've backed up your home directory of course).

 

I only copied two folders to the new home directory. I know that the home folder has a hidden library folder, so is that a problem there?

 

If you end up having to format and reinstall OS X, just hold down on Option when you turn on the computer and you will see at least two drive options, your primary partition, which would be Macintosh HD, and a restore partition, which would be Recovery 10.8. Select the recovery partition and you will boot into the Mountain Lion Installer. From there, you will be able to reinstall OS X and you will save yourself the time and trouble of going to the Apple Store.

 

I didn't want to download 4.7 GB+ of files, so I ended up taking it to the apple store for a quick reinstall. They reset the ACL and permissions etc, but eventually said that it is better to just do a reinstall which I had anticipated.

 

Yes, ~/Library has a shed load of important stuff in it, including all your preferences, keychains, and user-specific application data. I can imagine all sorts of subtle problems occurring if the files can't be written to because they're owned by another user ID. If you copy ~/Library to a new user account, I think you have to fix the ownership problem otherwise it will never work right.

Mac OS X stores most user settings in plist files under Preferences, but not all. And most cross-platform applications use a different method for managing user settings. So if you just deleted all the plist files under ~/Library/Preferences you didn't wipe everything. There's a bunch of other application subdirs under ~/Library which contain preference data in different forms. For example, Firefox stores its data under ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox.

I'm curious why the Apple Store suggested a re-install to fix a user account problem. If you restore your home folder files again after re-installing OS X, wouldn't you just have the same problem all over again? And if you want to start over with a fresh user account, you can do that without re-installing OS X.

 

It was a global problem as trackpad settings would not stick as well as the default wallpaper would revert back to the default galaxy one. My genius had to go and get another "expert" genius, since the way he put in laymen terms, my computer was acting like the display computers at the store where one restart on the next day gets rid of any tinkering that people have done to them before.