Fix Admin Permissions After the Restoring Leopard

Question

Please let me know if anybody is an EXPERT with permissions under Leopard. My permissions are messed up and Disk Utility is not going to fix them.
Here's a quick summary. I recently upgraded my Macbook Pro Hard drive and transfered all my files from my time machine back up. Initially, Time machine did not allow me to restore to the new hard drive. Maybe it had to do with different hard drive partition sizes; the 120 GB versus 500GB hard drive. So I proceeded to install MACOSX with the Leopard DVD and transfered my files with the migration assistant.
First, my login did not return after restoring Leopard. I had to reset the password through another admin account. Thus I had to re-establish the login and administrator account. Then I had to change the permissions on all my files for access; chmod -R 777.
Now, I am rebuilding my permissions and changing ownership on my files (just traditional .txt,*.doc,.xls, *.pdf files). I don't want these files accessible to everybody. But when I give the owner read/write permissions (chmod u+rw) and disable group/everybody (chmod go-rw), Leopard does not allow me access to my files. The workaround is "chmod -R 777" all files, which is ALARMING.
I have doubled check the permission and ownership on these files (ls -l) and I clearly have full access (-rwx); the my username, neville310, owns these files (sudo chown -R neville310:staff ~). I believe that that my login account is not properly setup. Any ideas?
<pre>
MacBookPro:Neville neville310$ sudo chmod -R go-rw .
MacBookPro:Neville neville310$ ls
ls: .: Permission denied
MacBookPro:Neville neville310$ sudo chmod -R ugo+rwx .
MacBookPro:Neville neville310$ ls -l
-rwxrwxrwx@ 1 neville310 staff 21860 Apr 11 16:33 TEMP_ToDO.txt
*file listing*
</pre>

Answer 1

Hey I've only had a brief moment at home to verify the problems you are having. Honestly I haven't put much thought in to it. But, in the meantime, while I try and think of why this is, if you aren't too uncomfortable going into the Terminal you can do this from the commandline fairly easily.
Assuming you want no access for "Everyone", open Terminal.app and type:
"chmod 750 " (without quotes and ensuring you have the trailing space).
Now, drag the file or folder you want to grant no access to onto the terminal window. Its path should show up and now you can press enter and now Everyone won't be able to read or write to this folder.
If you want to get rid of any access for Everyone and the group that owns the file/folder, then do the same as above but instead of "chmod 750..." do "chmod 700 ..."
Hope this helps until I can get a GUI fix going.