Finder thinks home dir is a package?!

Hey there-

For some odd reason finder sees the home dir for one user account on my iMac as a package file. When clicking on the home icon, it complains there is no default application to open this file and prompts me to choose one. The details shows that it thinks it is a package instead of a dir. control-clicking the home dir allows me to view the contents by choosing "Show package contents".

So far I have tried the following to resolve this issue:
- logged into Terminal and compared the perms with a user directory that is functioning correctly
- removed the launcher plist files in the users preferences and the share library folder (rebooted and emptied trash)
- ran the "fix permissions" routine in the disk utility.

Any further suggestions would be much appreciated.

Thanks,
Rob.

Well, for one thing, make sure the folder name doesn't end in ".app" That's one thing that'll do it.

What you really need is a program called "Package First Aid." Unfortunately, I've only ever seen it for Mac OS 9! If you have a PowerPC Mac, you might could run it in Classic, but otherwise...
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=60726

I dunno. There has to be a way under OS X, but I can't think of what it might be.

Thanks for the reply.

The directory is simply the username, no extension.

I am a mac newbie so I don't have any legacy installs to work with unfortunately. I really need to find a way to resolve this in OS X natively.

What other pieces of the system come into play when attempting to "launch" a directory? Is there any meta data associated with files beyond the extension that I can check?

Go to Users/YOURUSERNAME/Library/Preferences and delete:
com.apple.finder.plist

You will have to set up your preferences again.

Deleted the finder plist. Still no go.

I also tried "renaming" the folder in finder to see if there was some char that somehow was not visible there or via terminal. That did not help either.

It is starting to look like I should just recreate the account, but I am being a little stubborn at this point.