Your suggestion is clear; but, I had already experimented, Creative Scientific that I am, and had done what I described above in an attempt to repair things on that partition ... what did I actually do? The Get Info on partition Docs shows:
Owner: system
Access: Read and Write
Group: admin
Access: Read and Write
others: Read only
and the individual folders and their contents show:
Owner: "local username"
Access: Read and Write
Group: admin
Access: Read and Write
others: Read only
I'm wondering if things are back to normalcy, but I don't have much to compare it to ... originally using CCC 3.2.1 across a Network, the Docs partition had the issues with Owner (local username) , Group (unknown) and Others. {an example in ( )}.
Would also like to apply this "technique" to my Apps partition ... but I sense that may be a deeper issue since "name.app" is really a packaged deal?
Have to admit, I've muddied the waters with my attempts to physically move disks and backup partitions around 2 of my computers, further adding use of Leopard on one, and Tiger on the other, and am now trying to use them as a backup for each other ... along with wanting to continue to work on files on each in my 2 studios. I started a thread here:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2039322&tstart=0
but I'm guessing it was too involved to invoke much more of a response than "run away" ... or more from my childhood: "duck and cover".
I have CCC, OnyX, BatChmod and applejack (current/OS X dependent versions) as tools for backup and repair, but need some guidance how to do so. Maybe making Owner "system" on all my Apps and Docs (partition level and subfolders) would solve all my issues, across machines and locally?
Have I messed up my system (those invisible files, etc), and things are now poised to eventually break apart? The Docs partition files appear to behave normally: I can open files, modify with apps, and Save them, and also copy files to the folders, without having to Authenticate. Before, Saving didn't work and I had to Authenticate to copy to them.
Suggestions welcomed.