System Prefs won't stick

I have a couple of Mac G-5 towers that have annoying quirks in the OS that I wonder if someone can help me solve. Both of them are running Leopard 10.5.8. One of the Macs has two hard drives in it, which I named A and B. I do all my work with Drive A, and it is assigned as the startup disk. I keep an OS on Drive B so that I can start up with it and use it to repair A if I ever have to.
So Disk A is assigned as the startup disk (and I clicked the little lock icon shut), but about half the time, when I start up the Mac, it will select Disk B to start up with. When that happens, I have to go to the system Preferences and choose A all over again, even though it is already shown as the startup disk. On the restart, it will usually start up correctly with A. But couple of startups later, the computer goes back to choosing Drive B as the startup disk again. This is getting tiresome. Short of throwing the System folder off of Drive B, how can I force this Mac to always use A as the startup disk?
Mac G-5 #2 also has an annoying habit: after I arrange a folder's window the way I want with the View Options, the next time the Mac starts up, the windows go back to the way they were before. For example, in the View Options, I set a folder's window to arrange items by Name, to show the icons at a large size, and to Show Info for the items in the folder. But the next time I open that folder, the icons have all gone back to the way they were before: tiny icons randomly scattered all over the window, with no info shown. How can I make these folder windows stay the way I set them?
I tried Disk Utility's "Repair Permissions" and "Repair Disk" on these drives, but these quirks persist. Is there any way to make a Mac stick to the assigned startup disk and window arrangements?

Hi Tom,
On the startup...
Might be time to replace the PRAM Battery, 4 years is close to their lifespan, far less if ever without AC power, & can cause strange startup problems...
See which one your G5 has...
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Newer%20Technology/CR2032/
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Newer%20Technology/BAA36VPRAM/
On #2's issue...
Safe Boot , (holding Shift key down at bootup), use Disk Utility from there to Repair Permissions, test if things work OK in Safe Mode.
Then move these files to the Desktop for now...
/Users/YourUserName/Library/Preferences/com.apple.finder.plist
/Users/YourUserName/Library/Preferences/com.apple.systempreferences.plist
/Users/YourUserName/Library/Preferences/com.apple.desktop.plist
/Users/YourUserName/Library/Preferences/com.apple.recentitems.plist
Reboot & test.
PS. Safe boot may stay on the gray radian for a long time, let it go, it's trying to repair the Hard Drive.

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Ay, ay, ay.
Gigabit G4, Tiger
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Hi
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when you say that you don't think it's a permissions
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Have same problem, plus other issues too....
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Hi,
Check out this thread: file:///Users/carolynssamit/Desktop/Mac%20Troubleshooting/Your%20network%20setti ngs%20have%20been%20changed...%20%20fix.webarchive
And here: http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?referrerid=59552&t=592305
And more here; http://forums.macworld.com/message/666874
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_bk

Hi and welcome to the forums.
Boot from your Install Disc, holding down the C KEY
1. Select your language
2. From the Menu Bar, select Utilities>Disk Utility
3. Select the HD, click the first aid tab
4. Select Repair Disk. Reboot.
Then from Applications>Utilities>Disk Utility, select the HD and Repair Disk Permissions.

System Prefs. problem. Application problems. Need advice.

The problems I am having:
1) Mail will not open. It hangs, shows beach ball and stays that way. All you see is the menu-bar. Force quit will not work. Only hard reset. Activity Monitor shows the app sucking up 87-95% of processor.
2) System preferences are not staying. Specifically, my mouse preferences for scrolling, keyboard illumination, Safari address bar buttons. This gets worse if I have to do a hard reset if Mail gets launched. It can clean the whole system prefs. sometimes. (update: My 2 finger scrolling goes off even when I haven't shut down, restarted, etc. I have to go into Sys. Prefs. and recheck it)
Let me start from the beginning of the problem:
I was on a website for a real estate company. It uses an active server application that never works right with a Mac. I almost always use Safari for it. What happens is that the sever app. usually hangs and won't go to the next page. I've tried all my browsers except Opera, so, I figure I would give that a go and see if it's better. BAD IDEA! Opera 8.6 hung. It wouldn't force quit. I had to do a hard reset like , 5 times, before it would restart. After that happened is when things got bad. My system prefs. were all gone. I had to reset all that. And then, Mail just went t1t5 up. It did what I said above. Hung. So I had to figure out how I was gonna get all my mail over into Thunderbird. I backed up the HD, and luckily, through Apple forums and Google, came up with the .emlx to .mbox converter. Tedious but worked. I deleted Opera off my HD as well as Mail. I am not even gonna bother with Mail again after having to deal with Apple's stupid file format and having no way to import a back-up. Thunderbird is way better and PGP actually works on it. Scr3w Opera as well.
At this point, my biggest problem I have is that my system prefs don't always seem to stick. I need to find out which files are associated with this and fix it. I am also paranoid that something got backdoored on my system and is causing havoc. Although I doubt this happened, I would like to see if someone can look at my processes and see if anything looks abnormal. All these problems have happened with my standard account with no Admin privileges ( unless I type in the Authorization on a per instance event). My Admin account is not having problems and my other standard account is OK. So I am pretty sure it's a local problem and not associated with root.
Anyone knowledgeable with some good ideas would be appreciated. I almost never have problems. I'm kinda p155ed this happened. Luckily I could still do a back-up and was not in a recording session or anything.
You can download my Processes List in PDF at this address:
http://badapplestudio.com/actmonscreen.pdf
Sorry for the long description,but there are a lot of factors that lead up to this.
Thanks,
~sKot
1.67 G4 Pbook , 500 G4 Pbook,Dual 2.7 G5 Tower Mac OS X (10.4.7) Also Dell P4 for Gigasampler

I'm having similar problems to those described by ~scot. The apps that won't launch are (so far)
Mail
Address Book
Safari
Safari gives the spinning beach ball, but Mail and Address Book merely show the black triangle indicating they are running (though they are not.)
Force quits are fights. I haven't had to restart but I have to use the force quit menu command or the "three fingered salute" four or 5 times.
Have deleted plist for Safari but hesitated to do so for Mail and Address Books because of fear of losing more than settings - perhaps too cautious but if anyone knows of another way I would prefer that.
Rebooted from original discs and ran Disk First Aid, ran TechTool Pro and Disk Warrior to no effect. Had run Onyx for regular maintenance the week before the problems began but have not done so since.
Suggestions gratefully welcome!
ceedee
Quicksilver G4 Mac OS X (10.3.9)

System Prefs won't stick

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