I’m very glad you were able to solve your problem. I’m usually able to supply more accurately, however, I was limited in reply via a mobile device — somewhat restricting my research that leads to more aggravating copy and paste routines. 

If you search the Mac OS X Help site via the search input field near the right upper area of the site — keying in “About This Mac” — I believe there is an entire post on how to gather troubleshooting and diagnostic information about your specific computer.  

A result of serious health issues related to my in-laws — we haven’t been able to progress the site with new content beyond trying our best to continue to answer all incoming comments.   I hope to solve this gracefully somehow in the near future.  This will benefit users by pushing the site in a generalized direction; focussing on all Apple products and services — not just the currently released operating system. 

I’m pleased you were able to troubleshoot my snippet of a hint and adapt it to meet the requirements of your version of Mac OS X. 

Good luck in the future; always remember — curiosity will educate you, while fear will only hold back your educational progression of computer use. Yes; you may break something in rare cases — more technically mis-configure — but that’s why we’re here — to help you back out of that rabbit hole. 
– 
Scott

Hopefully a contextual menu item will pop up and one of the selections will be “delete” or “remove”.

I believe if you read a few of the replies above — in the comments to this very blog post — another user also comes to the same conclusion.

– Scott

Ahh @AK, sorry about that, I forget that there are two people int his comment section that have very similar problems.

Starting with permissions – Yes, even if you have an admin account, you will still have to modify the permissions. Levels of permissions are something along the lines of system users, users, admin users, and root user. The root user is the only user who can do anything without being pestered.

Since you managed to get most of everything back to normal, albeit with the mention of some of the issues you have had, it’s hard to say without having my hands on the machine.

While I don’t do that much of it anymore, I used to spend day in and day out fixing Macs. 20′s of them a day, and the steps in which I would move aside the prefs folder is something I would do to almost any machine that was have troubles that I didn’t know how to solve already.

Machines that behave like yours would get a full re-install treatment, as there is really no way to know what is going on without spending more time on the machine than the client would ever want to pay.

Myself, I have been known to be stubborn, and spend 10+ hours on my machine, and re-install and re-build a system 10x over until I do learn what the trouble was. Most are not willing to take it that far.

My first guess is that since you adjusted the permissions for the ~/Library folder, that could be hanging something up. I would have advised against that. You need to get those restored. Not only the permissions, but the ACL as well. Since you restored your data from a backup, and I would assume to a new account, the Library directory should have the correct permissions and ACL’s.

Something very close to this:
drwx——+ 66 username staff 2244 Oct 15 20:23 Library
0: user:_spotlight allow list,search,file_inherit,directory_inherit,only_inherit
1: group:everyone deny delete

When you restore your system, something is getting copied over that is causing your menu’s to misbehave. If I had to take a guess, I would delete these two files from the Preferences folder:
.GlobalPreferences.plist
.GlobalPreferences.plist.lockfile

They will be invisible, and you will need to do so in the terminal
If you were so inclined, you could perform these steps to do so:

mkdir ~/Desktop/dotfiles
mv ~/Library/Preferences/.GlobalPreferences.plist ~/Desktop/dotfiles
mv ~/Library/Preferences/.GlobalPreferences.plist.lockfile ~/Desktop/dotfiles
Restart your machine
The above two files will be recreated eventually. You will lose some settings like window positions, list versus column view, pretty cosmetic stuff, nothing major at all.

What specifically is wrong with your Office Database? I take it you are using Entourage? If you aren’t using Entourage, what is in the Office Database that you need to keep? Can’t you just move it out of the way, let office re-create it, and be on your way? That’s actually how I would start anyway, move the entire Microsoft Office folder out of the way, launch an Office app, this will recreate their all the folders you just moved out of the way. Then, go grab one of the folders from the files you moved aside, and replace those of the new ones Microaoft made. Of course, make sure app Microsoft apps are quit. Launch a Microsoft app, and see if it works. If it does, move on to the next file/folder until you have found the one that is causing trouble.

I don’t believe this has anything to do with your computer.

Glad you decided to start new, I am sure in the long run you will be much happier with your computer and how it performs.

Before I got your last post, I was able to change the Preferences folder name and do the test that way, with the help of a work colleague, using the Terminal. Did exactly as you asked – while logged in as the corrupt User, I change that User’s Preferences folder to Preferences.old. A new Preferences folder was seemingly auto-generated. I logged out and attempted to log back in. However, the computer just hung on the login background, but never resolved to the desktop.

I was able to reverse what I did through my secondary User, going through the Terminal again to change the folder names.

Before I could report on this progress, I received your posting – so then proceeded to try out your first suggestion, ie: create a folder on the desktop called “Possible corrupt prefs” and move the contents of the Preferences folder there. A total of 497 items. It actually copied everything over, no items were physically moved. I then deleted the contents of the original Preferences folder, logged out, logged back in – SAME PROBLEM. Desktop would not load.

Here’s where the fun began. I tried to reverse this process, by moving the contents or even the entire “Possibe corrupt prefs” folder back into the corrupt User’s Library folder (through my secondary user account). Note that I had to adjust the Sharing & Permissions for the Library folder in order to gain access into it (despite my second user being an Admin).

PROBLEMS – the contents and/or folder would not copy over in its entirety. Only 331 of the 497 files would transfer. And regardless of what I tried, my main User account was pooched. I was not able to login and restore the desktop.

This morning, I restored my computer from my Time Machine backup. Now I’m stuck today trying to get my Microsoft Office database back up and running.

And of course, my Finder problem is still there.

Not sure what to try next.

Argh!!!

NOTE – I did create a new user account and write down all the original Prefs. This list of preferences does not match what appeared in the new Preferences folder that ended up within my main User after my initial failed test (using Terminal).

Apple has locked this folder off from being renamed, as doing so can generally break things pretty bad.

Since there is no graphical app that I can find to suggest that would allow you to rename the folder, I don’t quite know what to suggest.

I am hesitant to give you terminal commands that would alter the extended attributes, which we would then restore, as this is getting way beyond the scope of this site.

You could also change the name of the folder in the terminal, thereby skipping the need to alter the extended attributes. That get’s the terminal commands down to very simple and basic ones, but I still am not comfortable suggesting that on this site.

If you are feeling brave, you can always google how to rename folders using the terminal. You will need to do so with super user permissions in this case.

For now, we could try to work around it in a less ideal way. Make a new folder on your desktop called “possible corrupt prefs” and open your Preferences folder. Select everything and move them to the folder we made on the Desktop.

Some will move and some will probably copy. That is fine. Now, delete everything from the Preferences folder.

Log out of your account, and log back in.

* I would keep a known working test user account on your machine as an admin user in case something goes wrong. you can always log into that account and fix things from there.

Once you are logged back in, you will see your computer has defaulted to looking like a new user account. Hopefully your problem has gone away. The files that are in the Preferences folder now represent one or more files that are in the “possible corrupt prefs” folder that are bad.

From this point, restore everything to how it was, so you delete everything out of the current Prefs folder, move everything back from the “possible corrupt prefs” folder, log out, and log back in. Your problem will be back, btu you have a list of files that are potential targets to start deleting, logging out, logging in, and testing if your problem is fixed.

This method works identical to my other suggestion, however, it is more work, and will not move invisible files in the Prefs folder. More than likely it is an invisible file that is causing you these troubles.

You can give it a try and see if it works though. One thought is to create a new user account, log into that account, look in the Prefs folder, and take note of the files in that Prefs folder on the new account. That is the same list of files that you will get by performing the steps listed above. You can then move out just those files form your misbehaving account, log out, log in, and see if it solved the problem.

In the bad account, rename the directory of ~/Library/Preferences to ~/Library/Preferences.old, make a new directory called Preferences, log out, and log back into the same account.

It is important to not try to move the files inside of your Preferences directory by hand, but to rename the directories; moving the files will not generally move the invisible files you can’t get ahold of in the Finder.

Your mac will look pretty near what it does when you create a new account. See if the menus are repaired. If they are, then look in the new Preferences folder, which will be rather sparse on number of files compared to your old one. It will be one of those files that is causing your issues.

Resist any urge to adjust mouse settings or other Preferences, we are trying to specifically avoid the creation of new Prefs files other than what are required to load the Finder into user space.

I will then generally take the small batch of files, copy them into the Preferences.old directory, rename the current Preferences folder to Preferences.apple and rename the Preferences.old back to Preferences.

Log out, log back in, and you should be good to go. Clean up the folders we made as temporary working areas.

If the problem comes back, then it is one of the few invisible files in Preferences, in which case, you can post back here and I will tell you which one it more than likely is.

If that doesn’t do it, since you do still have a working account when you make new accounts, I would repeat the above steps but with the Application Support directory in the Library directory. Of course, do so after restoring the Preferences directories. I think it would be unlikely that the two of them correlate to this issue.

* All of these suggestions are in reference to files in your home folder, NOT the ones in /System or /Library are the top of your hard drive.

P.S. hexley is scott and Scott is hexley

@Hexley – to further clarify – I was not trying to make any modifications. It was after running the Migration Assistant, that I noticed the Finder and Sidebar command names became messed up. I know that a bandaid solution would be to just create a new User and start fresh from there – however I am trying to avoid that. I believe that nau and I are in the same boat here. If you ask me, a clean install of system and all my apps and settings is not a solution, but a work around – and a labour/time intensive one at that.

My best guess is that each individual User account’s preferences has a pointer file to the LocalizableCore.Strings code. And it is this pointer file that is corrupted on my main user account, but intact in my secondary user account. Any insight into what file this might be?

If you are having trouble as a result of corruption, I would read through this article,which will explain what is happening, how you can customize the labels on your sidebar, and in your cases, how to restore things back to the way they are by default.

If it really is called SHARED and not Shared then the rename could be part of the problem. I would start by running a permissions repair on your entire disk to see if that fixes it. You can do this with Disk Utility in your Utilities folder within your Applications folder.

If that also does not solve your troubles, you will have to run some terminal commands to learn what the underlying problems are.