G5 Boots, Just Not Into Primary User Anymore

[sp_clark]

Co-worker crashed G5 while in Excel.

G5 (10.4.10) now won't boot into her account. Boots thru log-in screen (& other Users work OK, including Root) but Beach Ball cursor & a magnifying glass at upper right screen corner, with her Desktop Picture of Choice as a background, is where it stalls.

Ran Permissions & Disk Repair while booted from a Maintenance Drive, also DiskWarrior directory rebuild. Also deleted all Adobe FNT files while booted into Root.

No change.

Other User accounts work fine, just not the primary users.

Short of an Archive & Install of a clean OS, where can I focus efforts to bring back functionality of this User account?

[Giaguara]

Try to hold down shift (after login screen).
This will do a safe login - hopefully whatever is causing the crash will fix itself with it.

Doing an archive and install would not be a good choice as it only affects one user. If you save the user and network preferences, the issue will be there as it is something (corruption, cache, login item etc) that is affecting only this one user.

Let me know how you succeed with safe login.

[sp_clark]

<Shift> after log-in screen didn't work, but <shift> at reboot did - at least after I waited thru the interminable spinning ratchet until <safe boot> appeared in red just above my log-in options.

Now I have the Wonky User's Desktop up, everything looks OK.

Do I just Reboot or is/are there things I can/should do now to "fix" what was the problem?

With OS'S <10 <shift> would get you booted alright, but the Extensions were off, making Work As Usual problematic.

Thanks BTW for getting me this far down a new road.

[eric2006]

If you get into the primary user via safe mode, you may want to disable login items:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106146

[Kees Buijs]

Originally Posted by eric2006

If you get into the primary user via safe mode, you may want to disable login items:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106146

You can also delete and recreate the user. This might also work.


Good luck, Kees

[icemanjc]

You could just make another account and drag all of the important files from the bad user account into the new one.