HELP ! accounts disappeared

[Flynnstone]

I hope I can get some help on this one.
I was adding a Guest account to a iMac running 10.2.8. I am the only administrator. I restricted the Guest account so that it couldn't do things like run certain programs.
I logged into guest and tried to run Word, but was denied because of permissions. Strange I thought. So I went back to my login, brought up System preferences and the "Accounts" icon is missing!

What can I do?

 

[MacDawg]

When in doubt always...

Restart
Repair permissions
Zap PRAM

...check here for more info on how...

...and then go from there.


Woof, Woof - Dawg

 

[Flynnstone]

Tried that.
Need a plan B.

 

[Raid]

I hope I can get some help on this one.
I was adding a Guest account to a iMac running 10.2.8. I am the only administrator. I restricted the Guest account so that it couldn't do things like run certain programs.
I logged into guest and tried to run Word, but was denied because of permissions. Strange I thought. So I went back to my login, brought up System preferences and the "Accounts" icon is missing!

What can I do?

Man your non admin accounts are really giving you problems eh? First the printer now this!


This won't get the 'Accounts' icon back in your system prefs, but you should be able to manage some of the account preferences which might help. I'm not at my Mac, but in /Applications/Utilities there is a network utility (is it called Network Utility??) that you can use to examine user accounts... becarefull what you do because you run the possibility of fouling up other accounts! To be on the safe side you'll probably see the user accounts starting with an id number of 500 or greater... Only mess with them, and only if you're sure you know what you're doing!

One question, did you name the guest account "Guest"? The name guest is used by our flavour of Unix to denote permissions and OS X might not have liked you naming a user account that. I named my 'guest' account "Visitor"

 

[Flynnstone]

Man your non admin accounts are really giving you problems eh? First the printer now this!

One question, did you name the guest account "Guest"? The name guest is used by our flavour of Unix to denote permissions and OS X might not have liked you naming a user account that. I named my 'guest' account "Visitor"

Ya ...just call me Murphy

I think that last part of your comment is correct ... about "guest'.
I think I've invoked entropy here.
I went into the NetInfo utility and enabled the root. I then logged in as root and changed the permissions of guest back. I then went into Sys Prefs -> Accounts. I looked at my user and the "Enable Admin ..." check box was grayed out. Strange !
I then selected another little used account an enabled it to admin. I then logged into this account and ran Sys Prefs -> Accounts. I selected the non working (Admin) account and I could change the Admin checkbox.
I logged out and back into the account with the trouble & still no "Accounts".
So ... I will stubble along with the other admin account and will shortly do a clean install of Panther.

Thanks for the help. Much appreciated