FIXED! How I fixed Mail not remembering passwords, keychains, certificates

Question

As noted in this lengthy thread, hundreds of users who upgraded to Leopard were experiencing their email accounts not remembering their passwords in Mail. Since the upgrade to Leo, I was seeing this, too. Every hour or so, I'd need to reenter all the passwords to all 8 emails that I had. I also was seeing odd keychain behavior with Safari. I'd need to re-enter passwords and certificates over and over again.
From reading the above thread, a couple posters had come up with a fix. I modified it slightly, and for the past 3 days, everything has worked perfectly. Note that I'm no geek, don't really get why it worked, and basically attacked this like a man with a shotgun shooting a mouse. So what I did may break your system or cause you to die from cancer. But here's the steps I did that eliminated the problem
1. I quit Mail & Safari.
2. I opened up Keychain Access (in Utilities) and deleted everything I possibly could. I initially tried to just delete Mail and Safari-related stuff, but that didn't work, so I deleted everything the system allowed me to delete.
3. I ran Keychain First Aid (Menu: Keychain Access). I re-ran it about 4 times until it couldn't repair anything further (there was a dozen things it said it couldn't change, but there you go).
4. I then hooked up a second Mac, via Firewire, that had recently had a clean install of Leopard on it. I dragged the Mail app file over into the applications folder had it replace the existing Mail app.
5. I did the same with Safari, replacing the existing Safari app file.
(NOTE: I hear you can do essentially the same thing for steps 4 and 5, using your original Leopard install discs and a program called Pacifist, but that was more techie than I felt comfortable with. But I hear it does the same thing as copying over clean virgin copies of Mail and Safari, as I did in steps 4 and 5)
6. I then repaired permissions (via the Disk Utility in Utilities). I think this step is a little like smudging with sage, or chanting, but in fact both the new Safari and the Mail app needed thousands of repairs, so perhaps this wasn't as voodoo as suspected.
7. I then restarted the Mac. Upon opening up Mail, I did, of course, need to re-enter all of the passwords again. But that was it. That was 3 days ago, and I've been groovy ever since. I've restarted the apps, and restarted the Mac numerous times. So far, all passwords and keychains and certificates have remained solid.
So there you go. How I Fixed a Hair-Pulling Glitch in my Otherwise Nice Leopard System.
Scott
http://www.braintoniq.com

Answer 1

Did you copy both key3.db and signons.sqlite to the profile folder?
You can use this button to go to the Firefox profile folder:
*Help > Troubleshooting Information > Profile Directory: Open Containing Folder
It is possible that there is a problem with the files key3.db and signons.sqlite that store the encrypted names and passwords in Firefox.<br />
Rename the files key3.db and signons.sqlite in the Firefox profile folder.<br />
You can add .old to the file names (key3.db.old and signons.sqlite.old) or move them to another folder to make it possible to undo the action.<br />
You need to set a new Master Password after renaming or deleting key3.db and all currently saved passwords are lost.<br />
If that has worked then you can remove the renamed files that are no longer needed.<br />
* "Troubleshooting" in http://kb.mozillazine.org/Password_Manager