The Spinning Wheel

Question

Hello,
When I tried to sleep my computer last night as is my habit, I had the spinning wheel going on the desktop screen.  I finally gave up and went to bed only to wake up this morning with the wheel still spinning. In trying to troubleshoot I went to disc utility/first aid and clicked on verify disc permissions.  A couple of items jumped out at me...
User differs on "System/Library/Java/JavaVirtual Machines/ 1.6.0.jdk/Contents/Home/lib"  Should be 0 is 95
Warning SUID file "System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/MacOS/ARDAg ent" has been modified will not be repaired.
After running permissions repair I decided to start the process over again with "verify permissions" only to find that all the original permissions variances came up just as they were the first time.
What is going on with this?  Help.
Thanks

Answer 1

As long as the report ends up with 'Permissions repair complete' then, as far as permissions go, you are fine. You can ignore the various statements in the report:
Permissions you can ignore on 10.5 onwards:
http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1448
Using 'should be -rw-r--r-- , they are lrw-r--r--' as an example, you will see the that the permissions are not changed, but the | indicates a different location. This is because an update to Leopard onwards changed the location of a number of system components.
Poster rccharles has provided this description of what it all means:
drwxrwxrwx
d = directory
r = read
w = write
x = executeable program
drwxrwxrwx
|  |  |
|  |   all other users not in first two types
|  | 
|  group
| 
owner
a little more info
Before the user had read & write. A member of the group had read.
After, only the user had read & write.