Lots of problems trying to delete users

Question

My situation is that my girlfriend and I were sharing one account. Well the desktop and dock was getting very cluttered, so I wanted to create a seperate account for her. Which then I decided that I was just going to change the names of both accounts and use the new account because it would be easier to transfer my files.
I had alot of problems trying to change short names of accounts, and since that did not seem possible I tried to delete the account which I had just made. In Account Preferences, I tried to delete a newly created account. I unlocked the padlock to make changes, but I could not even select any of the accounts. I did this from another admin account first. I even tried this with the root account, and still I could not even select any accounts in Account Prefences.
The only accounts I can select/delete are accounts that I had just created and not logged into yet. After I logged into a new account, an orange cirlce icon with the check mark in the middle shows up beside the new account in Account Preferences.
Then I found something in a forum that mentioned how to delete an account through Terminal. I created a dummy account just for practice. That seemed to work well enough. I tried to delete my other new account that I made for myself. Well I had switched the names on the two accounts. So when I typed in the name of the new account, Terminal thought it was still the name of the original account. The original account seems to be gone, but all the files are still accessible(luckly I had set the permissions before so that we had access to each others files easily.) I stopped in the middle of the process of fully following the instuctions on a forum on the original account and I lost the site because I was on the original account when deleteing in terminal.
My question is what can I do to either get the account back or any other things I can do to fix my problem. I was thinking about just taking all the files from the old account and just transfer them to a newly created account.
She has photoshop, so I was not sure how that would effect that program.
All the files are still in Users folder in the Mac folder in My Computer. So that is good.
I created another new account called "Jennifer Stoltes"(short name "jennifer") so I could just transfer everything from the accidentally deleted account. When I sign on this user the name shows up as "new" in the User name in the upper right corner of the screen. "new" is the name of the account I created to try deleting through Terminal, which I thought I completely deleted.
How do I transfer everything from one account to another. Can I re-create the original account because the folder is still in the Users folder in finder.
I don't know who would want to tackel the problems I created. If all else fails, I might just have to call tech support or take it to the apple genius bar.

Answer 1

Choose Go to Folder from the Finder's Go menu and enter /private/var/log/ as the folder's location; once this folder has appeared, check the modification date of the file named daily.out. If this date is prior to the deletion of the account, follow the instructions in sections 1 and 2 of this article. Doing this will restore the account setup to the configuration it was in within 5 minutes of the timestamp on the file mentioned earlier.
If not, create two new administrator accounts on the machine, log in with each account, and then copy the data associated with one of the two original accounts to the desktop. Once this has been done, move the files to the correct location in the current home folder, restart the computer or log out from all of the accounts except for either of the new ones, delete the old ones, and then use this application to change the short names of the current accounts.
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