User Settings Have Gone

Hi everyone and thanks in advance for any help you can give me.

I am a new Mac user with an intel Macbookpro bought only 2 or 3 weeks ago. I have been relatively happy using my Mac and had 3 mail accounts set up and working, I successfully imported 4000+ pictures into Iphoto and I have created my own web site in IWeb. The other night while installing some software (Messenger I think), things started to go wrong and here are the symptoms

1. I start mail and it acts like I have never used it before, walking me through my e-mail setup again. The mail accounts are still on my hard drive. I read that if I just re-enter my account details all of my mail will be found but I really would prefer to try and figure out what went wrong.

2. iPhoto when opened, will show me the thumbnails for all of my pictures but when I try and view the actual picture all I see in the picture pane is a Grey square with a dotted white border and an exclamation mark in the middle. I tried rebuilding the thumbnail cache but this had no effect. The iPhoto folder structure and all of the pictures are still on the drive

3. When I started iTunes it was if I had just started it for the first time asking me the usual questions about managing my tunes etc.

4. In iWeb, my previously created site is not listed, it asks me to create a new one, although the published to folder data for my created site is still on my drive.

I suspect I have moved or deleted some sort of user prefs or settings file but after searching I cannot find a solution. Could it be that I or the baby ( I know its unfair to blame a small child ) has deleted a KeyChain, or moved a pref file somewhere it should not be. There are some files in teh trash can but I would not know what they do or where to put them if I could get them back.

I have tried the following

1) Repair Disk Permissions

2) File System Check

Any one able to give me some guidance here?

Thanks again

It *sounds* like you have inadvertantly created a new account, OR tried to change the name of your present user account. Is that possible? IF you change the name of your current user account, Mac OS X does not react gracefully. I saw one poster describe it a "goes postal". This was a reference to wholesale data loss of the type you are describing.

mac57 said:

It *sounds* like you have inadvertantly created a new account, OR tried to change the name of your present user account. Is that possible? IF you change the name of your current user account, Mac OS X does not react gracefully. I saw one poster describe it a "goes postal". This was a reference to wholesale data loss of the type you are describing.

Click to expand...

I cannot see any evidence that the name has changed. It is the same user login name at startup and the user directory once logged in still has the same name. Thanks for the advice anyway.

I have now noticed on opening a new site in iWeb that it is reporting that 2 fonts are missing. This is for the same template that I was using before without any problems.

Maybe Found the Problem

I think I may have found the problem but would like an opinion. I was looking through my user directory and in the movies folder, there is a Library folder which does not seem to belong. It looks like I must have copied or moved this from its proper location. I will now try and put it back and see what happens.

Welcome to Mac-Forums, Ruslan124!

Well if your Home Library folder was moved, that does indeed explain the whole weirdness. I hope a simple move to the right location and a restart fixes your problem...

Let us know what happened next.

Problem Fixed

For those interested and anyone else who might find themselves in the same situation, I have fixed the problem and it was in fact because the Library folder had been moved. I simply moved it back and everything is good.

The problem with iPhoto was not related but again I fixed it. I had been renaming some of my picture folders in my iPhoto library directory so that they made more sense. However, I did not realize that the thumbnails are actually in a different folder called Data with an identical folder structure. Although I fixed the problem by deleting everything in my iPhoto directory in my pictures folder and reimporting, I believe that if I had also changed the name of the thumbnail folder in data, this might have solved the problem also.