Broken user account

Question

For the last two weeks i have experienced diffrent kinds of problems on my mac. It started with problems when I wanted to sync my iPone. Then I had problems with getting my Airport Express using airtunes. The Adobe CS suite started to behave strange. I got various errors and messages. After trying almost everything without reinstalling the system I got a hint from a friend... he said try creating a new user with admin acces. I created a new user and everything workes fine. All syncing, all apps and the Airport Express with airtunes. I tried to repair permissions on the old user but it didn't do any difference. So I have been spending my weekend moving all my info over to the new user.
Is there a file/files that can get damaged that the user acount acces.
Is their anyone that have had the same problem.
The worst thing is that I felt like I was running Windows... various faults whitout any reason or logic. Fortunatley everything runs perfect again.

Answer 1

Trying a new user account is a common troubleshooting procedure. When you create a new user you start off without the preference files, contextual menu items, cache files, login items, etc. that would be included in a typical individual user account. A new account starts fresh. When everything works again then it means your problems were caused by something amiss that's in the old account but not in the new one. Given what you described a good start would be third-party software you installed such as contextual menu items and login items as well as possibly corrupted cache files.
You could try using one of the many maintenance utilities such as TinkerTool System to clear out all system and user cache files, font caches, etc. If you have third-party preference panes, contextual menu items, and login items try removing them to see if that helps. If not you can simply add them back.
Repairing permissions will not help because permissions are not repaired in your Home folder. Only system files and applications are scanned when you repair permissions.
Kappy's Personal Suggestions for OS X Maintenance
For disk repairs use Disk Utility. For situations DU cannot handle the best third-party utilities are: Disk Warrior; DW only fixes problems with the disk directory, but most disk problems are caused by directory corruption; Disk Warrior 4.0 is now Intel Mac compatible. TechTool Pro provides additional repair options including file repair and recovery, system diagnostics, and disk defragmentation. TechTool Pro 4.6.1 is Leopard compatible; Drive Genius is similar to TechTool Pro in terms of the various repair services provided. The current version, 1.5.1, is Intel Mac compatible.
OS X performs certain maintenance functions that are scheduled to occur on a daily, weekly, or monthly period. The maintenance scripts run in the early AM only if the computer is turned on 24/7 (no sleep.) If this isn't the case, then an excellent solution is to download and install a shareware utility such as Macaroni, JAW PseudoAnacron, or Anacron that will automate the maintenance activity regardless of whether the computer is turned off or asleep.
OS X automatically defrags files less than 20 MBs in size, so unless you have a disk full of very large files there's little need for defragmenting the hard drive. As for virus protection there are few if any such animals affecting OS X. You can protect the computer easily using the freeware Open Source virus protection software ClamXAV. Personally I would avoid most commercial anti-virus software because of their potential for causing problems.
I would also recommend downloading the shareware utility TinkerTool System that you can use for periodic maintenance such as removing old logfiles and archives, clearing caches, etc.
For emergency repairs install the freeware utility Applejack. If you cannot start up in OS X, you may be able to start in single-user mode from which you can run Applejack to do a whole set of repair and maintenance routines from the commandline. Note that presently AppleJack is not compatible with Leopard.
When you install any new system software or updates be sure to repair the hard drive and permissions beforehand. I also recommend booting into safe mode before doing system software updates.
Get an external Firewire drive at least equal in size to the internal hard drive and make (and maintain) a bootable clone/backup. You can make a bootable clone using the Restore option of Disk Utility. You can also make and maintain clones with good backup software. My personal recommendations are (order is not significant):
1. Retrospect Desktop (Commercial - not yet universal binary)
2. Synchronize! Pro X (Commercial)
3. Synk (Backup, Standard, or Pro)
4. Deja Vu (Shareware)
5. PsynchX 2.1.1 and RsyncX 2.1 (Freeware)
6. Carbon Copy Cloner (Freeware - 3.0 is a Universal Binary)
7. SuperDuper! (Commercial)
8. Data Backup (Commercial)
The following utilities can also be used for backup, but cannot create bootable clones:
1. Backup (requires a .Mac account with Apple both to get the software and to use it.)
2. Toast
3. Impression
4. arRSync
Apple's Backup is a full backup tool capable of also backing up across multiple media such as CD/DVD. However, it cannot create bootable backups. It is primarily an "archiving" utility as are the other two.
Impression and Toast are disk image based backups, only. Particularly useful if you need to backup to CD/DVD across multiple media.
Visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQs on maintenance, optimization, virus protection, and backup and restore.
Additional suggestions will be found in Mac Maintenance Quick Assist.
Referenced software can be found at www.versiontracker.com and www.macupdate.com.