When backing up my "Home" directory before upgrading to a new hard-drive, I was unaware of the various Unix permissions that had to be conserved, in order to do this successfully. When reinstalling this backup into my newly reinstalled OS X 10.2.8 system folder on my new hard-drive, I found that most of my files and many of my applications were unusable. I had copied the backed up files using the Root account, and apparently this had changed all the permissions such that the files were now owned by Root, not by me!
A bit of frantic Unix research on a local Mac bulletin board followed (Revelation BBS, in Vancouver BC), where I found a tip contributed by Derek M. Warren, who came up with the following. This has (apparently) worked to restore full usability to my entire "Home" folder and files. In the Terminal app, type:
% sudo su % chown -R myname /Users/mynameThe first line gives you root level access; the second line restores the correct ownership of the home folder. Replace myname with your actual short username, of course.
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20031010151918438