Can't add or delete accounts in Mail, Contacts, and Calendars

[lil' brudder]

I have a friend with a 2009 MBP running 10.7 that has been migrated from 2 other previous, older machines. I found that the minus button is greyed out for all accounts except iCloud. Additionally, whenever I try to add a Gmail account (haven't tried others), whenever I put in all the information and click OK, it will verify it and say the information was accepted, but then it stays on the dialog as though you hadn't clicked OK. If you cancel, the account isn't set up.

Obviously there is some kind of OS corruption or permissions issues, but I'm wondering if I should bother trying to fix it, or if I should just wipe it and re-install.

 

[MacRobert10]

The standard procedure is to boot from the Recovery partition, open up Disk Utility, and repair the permissions on the drive. I just made a post about mail seemingly mixing up the contents of some of my mail, and I've never seen this before, so strange things can apparently happen. I don't use iCloud so possibly there's some type of setup parameters that are forcing you (unknown to you) to use iCloud for everything. That's a shot in the dark on my part, so take it for what it's worth.

I would only wipe the drive as a last ditch effort. If it's some type of config problem with iCloud you're unaware of and you attempt to set it up again, you'll just encounter the same problem.

 

[justperry]

The standard procedure is to boot from the Recovery partition, open up Disk Utility, and repair the permissions on the drive. I just made a post about mail seemingly mixing up the contents of some of my mail, and I've never seen this before, so strange things can apparently happen. I don't use iCloud so possibly there's some type of setup parameters that are forcing you (unknown to you) to use iCloud for everything. That's a shot in the dark on my part, so take it for what it's worth.

I would only wipe the drive as a last ditch effort. If it's some type of config problem with iCloud you're unaware of and you attempt to set it up again, you'll just encounter the same problem.

Bold, you can repair permissions directly in the OS with Disk Utilities, BUT, this will most likely not work for the reason that repairing permissions won't repair permissions on the Home Folder.

If the OP wants to repair the permissions on his Home Folder He can only do so by restarting in Recovery, Open Terminal and enter "reset password" without the quotes, hit enter and the password reset Utility will pop up, next he has to click on the Macintosh HD, then select the User in the drop down Menu and finally in the lower part reset the permissions, last is to quit the utility and then restart.

 

[MacRobert10]

Maybe I should have clarified it by saying "My standard procedure..."