Applications start as root

Question

I have been having trouble starting Adobe PS CS3 and thought it was just a possible Leopard issue with CS3. I have finally noticed in Activity Monitor that most of the applications I start, including FireFox, Safari, etc., start with as root. If I create a folder in my account using my drive's Finder window, the folder has a UID of root (drwxr-xr-x 2 root myimac 68 Nov 8 18:58 Test). The systems logs in with my User ID and displays my desktop and Documents folder, etc., but it seems confused when starting applications. I am assuming Finder is starting as root which is why it creates files as root. I even checked the UID and GID of files created before my updated to Leopard and match with what the Accounts advanced options show for my User and Group ID's. Has anyone else seen this issue and have a solution?

Answer 1

As another test, I created a new user. Again, the only running processes / applications that show up in Activity Monitor as the new user were Activity Monitor, bash, loginwindow, and mdworker. I started several other applications such as Safari, iPhoto, MS Word, & terminal and all these started as root. I opened my Documents folder and created a new folder, then used Word to create a document. Finder created the folder with uid=root and gid=staff. MS Word created a Microsoft User Data folder that also had uid=root and gid=staff. I saved a test document in the test folder I created and it was given root:staff as the uid:gid. I then used Finder (Macintosh HD) to copy and paste the file and this new file was created with newuid:staff. I was then able to delete the old file using Finder, but not from terminal (bash). I am assuming this is because bash is running as the user and not as root, but the permissions on the file and the folder are read only for staff and others. I can't even delete the file with the new users uid from terminal.
I am nearing the point of doing a total reinstall of the OS to see if that corrects the problems. I did have to rebuild the system once in 10.4 because of an issue that Safari seems to have had (may still have) where it would corrupt some system files and the system would sometimes get to where you couldn't log in (I saw other posts with similar issues). I took the system into the Apple store the first time that happened and all they could suggest was a reinstall. That fixed that problem for about two months until it happened again and I decided to try DiskWarrior to correct the issue. So I don't know if there may have been any residual issues lurking from the previous rebuild and DiskWarrior corrections