Settings that don't stick

[Colin Law]

On 28 December 2010 18:48, MR ZenWiz <mrzenwiz at gmail.com> wrote:
> I have an interesting situation that sometimes threatens to drive me
> up the wall.
>
> On my Dell workstation, if I change a setting in an app, say which
> mode to run in the calculator, it remembers the next time I run the
> calculator that it was last in Programming mode (for example).  On my
> home-built desktop, it never remembers any such settings and always
> runs in the minimal calculator mode unless I change it every time.
> Why would this be the case?
>
> OTOH, in the document viewer, no matter what I tell it to do,
> including "Save Current Settings As Default," it won't.  But, on the
> Dell it will remember for each document what the last view setting was
> and use that (if I "Save" them as noted), whereas on my desktop, it
> refuses to remember any settings at all.
>
> I think these two are related, but I'm beat as to why the two systems
> work in different ways (same installation disk, both systems fully up
> to date, etc.).

I wonder if this is a permissions issue.  I think those settings are
generally held in the hidden files and folders in the users home
directory.  Perhaps one or more have somehow become owned by root for
example and so cannot be written to by the user.

What happens if you make a new user on the problematic machine, do the
new users settings work ok?

Colin