The other week, I added an account to my Mac laptop specifically for Julia. Well, things went wrong after installing Panther, (Mac OS X version 10.3), and my laptop became unresponsive. Because I had previously added Julia as a user before I upgraded, I decided to log into her account and run the user administration tool. Her account is not an admin-enabled account, but from logging in using her user, I was able to add an alternate administrator account (after giving the system password), clean from any preference problem.

After adding the new administrator account, I quickly logged in using “fast user switching” (which I had also just enabled). From the temporary account, I was able to move files around (specifically the preferences) and isolate pretty much any problem. Through trial and error, I finally managed to get my computer back to a working state.

Interestingly enough, my work computer also had a similar problem and I can thank Brent for being an additional user there.

On both machines, programs would hang and crash time and time again. On my Mac laptop, the character palette would launch unrequested each and every time I logged in, too. It was almost comical, except that the system would become unresponsive, unable to even log out or shut down most of the time (getting it to do so took a long time and was sort of like a game of Russian Roulette rebooting).

I suppose that I could have booted the machines into single user mode, but rebooting each time to test that a changed worked (or not) would have been slow and aggrevating.

Moral of the story: add a user wthout much configured before (or immediately after) upgrading Mac OS X! It’s good to have another user account there just in case anything goes wrong.

So, big thanks to both Julia (for my laptop) and Brent (for the work box) for having me make users for them on my Macs. (: