desktop and dock preferences revert on restart

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I have a G4 running 10.4.11. I got the system from another department in my college and cannot figure out this problem. All the users can change their background picture and remove ? from their docks, but as soon as they log out and log back in or the computer is restarted, all the changes revert back to what they were originally.

I thought that perhaps the computer was loaded from an image and it is preventing me from changing this but the original administrator says he didn't do that (he also doesn't know why these changes won't stick).

Here's what I've tried already:
- creating new users and deleting the old ones
- deleting the preference plists
- deleting everything in the ByHost file
- deleting the globalpreference file and creating a new one

FYI, I also created a su login and I can change the background and other desktop preferences for that login, but not for anyone else, not even the administrator login.

Any ideas? Thanks!
 
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Can anyone help?

FYI, I did not change my home directory name. Can anyone offer any suggestions please?
 
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Location
little bit north of dallas
Your Mac's Specs
MBP C2D, 1 GB ram, 120GB HD
i know in windows there's a program called deep freeze that does what you're saying, loads from an image. but you say the former owner did not do this for the mac? the only thing it sounds like is somewhere the permissions are all locked out, presumably from the terminal or something...
 
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That was my first thought, but I checked all the permissions and they are fine. I even gave one of the users full access to everything just to see if that would make a difference. It didn't. The only thing I can think of is that there is some global preference somewhere that I don't know about that is automatically changing all the users to this default background and dock setting.

I'm not a Mac guru, but I've learned a lot these last couple of days. Still hasn't helped me though! I would really appreciate any help. I don't want to have to reload everything because we don't have all of the original app software since it came from another department and they did not keep track of these things.
 
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Your Mac's Specs
MacBook 2GHz CD
I have had the same issue recently, running OS 10.4.11 on a MacBook. My OS was native (installed at purchase), so it may not be an installation issue.

My Mac seems to have the following symptoms:
- Dashboard widget settings revert to default
- MS Office preferences revert to default
- Browser bookmarks deleted
- Mac OS Dock settings revert to default
- Screen saver picture reverts to default

The only recent update was Java for Mac OS X release 6 - could this be a factor ?
 

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