Snow Leopard (10.6.2) aborts everything I try to run after login

Question

Afternoon,
I have a new mac mini with Snow Leopard (10.6.2), fully patched and configured. This box sees my local nets, nfs mounts, OpenLDAP, etc, and seems to work fine for local accounts (root). I can ssh(1) into this box using a domain account (samba NT4 PDC, v3.3.3) and this seems to work just fine. When I log onto the head of the mac mini using a domain account, that still works over ssh(1), I get logged in but very quickly (moments) nothing will start. Terminal crashes, safari will not launch, after terminal crashes it will not relaunch.
I can't even log out.
I must ssh(1) using the same account, sudo to root, then 'shutdown -r now' to get the box to start again.
The ldap queries are working ok both when I ssh(1) in and do a 'ls -l /home' I see the right resolved user names coming from OpenLDAP. When I log into the console I see my home directory (/home/$USER) with the right files, etc. The NFS mounts (/home) come from a Fedora Core 5 linux box.
I'm not trying to use the mac mini as a server. I'm trying to get it to work as an orderly component of my internal network.
What is going on here and how do I fix the situation? I have this same problem with an iMac 27" running Snow Leopard (10.6.2), so I don't think this is hardware related.
Mike

Answer 1

It turns out that there's something wrong about permissions.
Here's the fix:
(1) log in as the +root user+
(2) type +chown -R Michael:staff ~Michael+
(3) log out the +root user+
(4) log in your account
(5) done!
Hope this thread will help those who encounter the same problem as me!