System Preferences Lost upon Restart / Reboot

Hi.
I wonder if anyone is able to help me with a mildly annoying problem.
I have an issue with my 24" iMac in that when it is shut down or rebooted, upon startup some (but not all) system preferences appear to be lost.
Typically this will include:
Mouse Preferences - button 3 and 4 preferences are lost, but not button 2
Firewall - permissions for certain programs (Vuze, for example) are lost
I have googled and googled and I can't find why this might be. If anyone could suggest anything I'd be grateful.
Thanks.

I'm having the same problem. Sometimes after a system startup I notice that some of my preferences are lost and things revert back to their default values. This can affect the Dock, Finder, iTunes, Screen Saver hot corners, etc. Each time the problem occurs it seems to be a different set of preferences lost and it doesn't happen all the time. For instance, the dock might move from my preferred location at the left side of the screen to the default location at the bottom of the screen. And sometimes all the icons that I normally have in my dock disappear and the default list is shown instead.
I have this problem on a Mac Pro running 10.5.6 but it has been occurring ever since I upgraded to Leopard. However, this problem does not happen on any of the other Macs that I own.

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You will have to reset your System Preferences to do this but it might help.
Locate this file: com.apple.systempreferences.plist It's here: /Home/Library/Preferences
Open the Preferences folder, locate that file, drag it to the Trash, empty the Trash and reboot.
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System Preferences Lost upon Restart / Reboot

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