Hmm, I came back to reply to an email notification of your response, but it seems to have been removed (forum monitors perhaps).
My only intent here is to help.
Some of the things you might have read into my reply were taken in a way I did not mean.
Substitute "reeks" with "tends to suggest," for one case where I could have chosen my words more gingerly.
Everything else is just speaking plainly. This is user-to-user support and as such there are limits to what we can know or guess about your knowledge & background, and to the extent to which anyone can help you, based on those factors and just as importantly, because of the number of things you have done perhaps inadvertently & unintentionally and can't recall/renumerate.
Some advice meant as helpful (but IMHO vital): There is a path ahead of you in your journey as an aspiring sysadmin. Familiarity with working with the Terminal is a key part of that. I went from Mac OS 6 -> 7 ->8 ->9 to Linux (lots of Terminal/shell work required to get YDL functioning on my AGP G4) and happily back to OS X. Which is to say (I think that), if I can do it anyone can 🙂
Suggested resources:
http://www.osxfaq.com/Tutorials/LearningCenter
http://www.tldp.org/LDP/Bash-Beginners-Guide/Bash-Beginners-Guide.pdf
The GUI is nice for certain tasks, but migrating into hidden (from the Finder) directories can cause permissions to get munged and throw a wrench in the works for services like Postfix.
It's hard to know if you can repair your installation, with the state it's gotten into.
You might want to hire someone to help (I'd suggest Pterobyte if he's able, and I have no official association with him).
One of the things you do need to do, is remove the .DS_Store files that are now in several places within /private/var
Before doing anything further, please make sure you have a full, known-good backup.
You can accomplish removal of the .DS_Store files via the Terminal, with the following:
sudo find /private/var -name '.DS_Store' -exec rm -rf {} \; -print
(Please note that all spaces and characters are required, apart from the final "-print" which
will show you the files removed, probably preferable).