Account login disappears, goes into 'groups' : how do I get it back?

I have a MB Pro 2.2 GHz with a newly installed hard drive 500GB. Experts at my university installed it. I installed the backup. OS 10.5.8 is on it.
Then after using it without problems for about one month, I started it up to find that my account was not available as it always is upon startup - no icon, no name awaiting me to type in the password. I manually typed in my username and password to no avail. Tried numerous times. I booted it back up from the DVD and reset the root password. I got in to the computer fine - and was able to locate my account with all of my files fine. When I go to system prefs / accounts, I see that my username is listed under 'groups' rather than 'My Account' or even "other accounts'. I'd like to get my computer back to where it was, with all of my stuff under one account. I don't have the most recent backup for time machine. But I did move what I think are all of my latest documents and stuff that came after the last time machine backup.
My questions are - should I do a time machine backup on the MB now even though the account issue is still screwed up? Or should I backup from a month earlier with time machine and then physically drag and drop the files I was able to locate that are newer than the backup and be done with it?
Or something else entirely?
Thanks,
Sheila

If you use the root account to copy the entire home folder from the affected user that should back up everything you need.
What you can try to do is recreate the user account, using the exact same name as the home folder in /users. It will ask you if you want to use this home folder for this account. If you aren't able to create the user because it already exists, rename the home folder, delete the affected account, rename the home folder back to what it was before, then recreate the account with the previous steps, assigning the home folder to the recreated account.

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