MrsRed, all speculation about HOW this happened aside, I assume that you want to
correct the situation! For now, I would recommend simply creating a new user account and transferring your personal data from the old one to the new one. This assumes that something has become corrupted in your old account, likely a Library preference file or some such.
To create the new account, go to System Preferences, Accounts and press the "+" sign in the lower left. Then fill in the required information, make sure that the account is the default account and restart. You should now have a pristine new account with everything looking as it should. If this works, then we need to move on to the issue of moving your personal data from the old account to the new one.
To transition your personal data, you can take any one of several approaches.
1/ Copy it out to an external hard drive from your existing corrupted account and then copy it from there back onto the Mac from within your new account.
2/ Use Finder - open a finder window from within your new account and go up one level, so that you now see your old account's home folder. Double click on that and you will now have a Finder window open in your old account. Now open another Finder window in your new account, and do the usual drag n drop from old to new.
3/ You can use Terminal.app, and a set of "cp" and "chown" commands to do a similar thing. To do this, open a Terminal.app window. It should open in your home folder. Type the following:
Code:
cd ../oldaccountname/Documents
cp -rfp * ../newaccountname
cd ../newaccountname
chown -R newaccountname *
That does it for the Documents folder. Repeat for your Music, Movies, Pictures and Sites folders and you will have transferred everything. These are the same folders you would have dragged and dropped in 2nd method.
Of these, the third one is likely the best, since it assigns the ownership permissions of the files to your new account once done.
4/ Other readers - are there any automated tools out there that would do this in a simpler fashion?
This leaves the not so obvious issue of transferring your Firefox bookmarks. They are hidden deep in your Library folder. I am guessing that the corruption in your account is rooted somewhere in the Library folder, so we don't want to copy it over. That would just corrupt the new account.
So, to transfer your Firefox bookmarks you will need to find them and move them over manually. To do this, start up Firefox in your new account, browse a page or two and then completely quit the application. This makes sure it has written out a bookmarks file, preferences, etc. Now, open a Finder window and navigate this path:
Library, Application Support, Firefox, Profiles
Double click the oddly named folder you see there
You are now in Firefox's main support folder. You should see a file named bookmarks.html. This file contains the bookmarks for your new account, and of course there isn't much of interest there.
Now, open a new Finder window, go up one level so that you can see your old account, descend down into it, and navigate down the same path outlined above. The "oddly named folder" mentioned above will have a different name of course in your old account. Now you should also see a file called bookmarks.html. Simply drag and drop this file from your old account window to your new account window and you are done! Close all Finder windows and restart Firefox. You should now have all of your old bookmarks.
This looks complicated when you write it all down, but it really isn't as hard as it sounds. Give it a whirl and let us know what happens.
