OS re-install after accidental deletion of User Account??

I am running Tiger 10.4.10 on a new MacBook and this morning, after I hade been moving things to/from the dock I noticed mail stopped working and a couple of apps wouldn't run. Turns out I'd accidentally trashed the main User Account thinking I'd only binned an Alias.

Upon re-booting the macine it created another default User Account in my name but it's contents were effectiveky blank. I the found the old deleted User acount in Trash, copied it back to the desktop and basically swapped all the folders in it for the folders in the User account the system had created upon re-boot (including library, desktop etc etc). All is working fine now.

It has now been strongly suggested that I do a complete re-install of the OS using the Archive and Preserve option to get a clean system. I am a little retiscent to do this merely beacuse I don't want to create more problems than I have now solved. It seems like it may be overkill BUT, nt knowing enough about Macs (and the person giving the advice clearly does), I'm just after a broader perspective before I go down this route.

Is a re-install so necessary for this problem (esp as I plan to upgrade to Leopard when it comes out)? Will what I've done (and what i did to fix it) have created so many problems that not fixing it properly with a COMPLETE re-install is only asking for trouble with problems ultimately building up on an OS which is now perhaps in a mess? Or, am I OK to leave as it is (esp in light of the Leopard relesase)?

I don't know any reason to do an Archive and Install. Sounds like you have everything back to normal. I would definitely fire up Disk Utilities and repair your permissions, they have probably taken a beating.

Thanks. I think I'll do just that for now, partiulcarly as I'll have to do a full archive re-install when Leopard comes out.

I believe Disk Utility/Repair Permissions can't be run on the disc it sits on and as such it will need to be run by inserting the CD ROM, shutting down and re-booting to run from the CD. I noticed, when I looked at the utility from the Utilities folder, that I had the option to Repair either the WHOLE drive or just the sub disk marked Mac HDD. Do you do it on just the latter? Parandoid about accidentally wiping the drive.

There are two parts to the Disk Utility repairs. One is to Repair Disk Permissions which can be run from the active boot disk. In fact under earlier OS X flavors, it had to be run from the active boot disk. The other is Repair Disk which fixes directory problems. You can run that from the active boot disk only as "verify" which will at least alert you to any potential problems. If it flags a problem, then you are right you must boot from your System Install disk and fix it.

Thanks for that. Should I run it on the whole drive (the upper-most icon that has the drive make and total size) or the sub icon below that (and indented slightly) which indicates Mac HDD?

The first item listed is the actual physical drive, the indent is the formatted volume on that drive, makes no difference!