"don't have permission to see its contents"

Greetings,

I'm really having problems with this Snow Leopard, and don't want to be agitated, or frustrated, but it's getting harder and harder to do so.

After installing on my 17" Macbook Pro, I was able to log in, fine, but was unable to do much of anything, as I was prompted to give a administrator password, but had no idea of what this was.

After trying every combination of my name (which has been my user name from before time), and pass work, I got it in my head that "this messing ain't cutting it."

After a bit of looking here on the forum, I was able to find out how to use my install disc to crate a "system administrator" account, and then, after restarting from my hard drive, I was able to go into the system preferences, find my users, and give myself permissions to act as an administrator (after this, I read several posts about how it's scary to crate an administrator account -- and it was -- but just tried to be strong -- channeling bit of strength from an alligator I once saw eat a big chunk of old truck tire, and just pressed on).

Now I should note that while I was log in as the (scary) administrator, I did seem that I was able to open folders without issue, however, when I logged back in as me (the monkey of wire), nothing much had changed, I could not open any folders with exception of "public" and something else like that...

The warning I get is ""don't have premission to see its contents" -- wow, I can't even look?

Frightening.

And, what scares me even more, is that I can go back in my time machine and see things that I would like to bring forward, but when I try to, I'm told "this is part of OS X and can't be modified... " or something close to that... Don't worry about this issue right now, I think it might be tied to the "no permission" deal, but if I've lost those back ups... Well, we all know what that feeling is like, and I will be feeding parts of my grays anatomy to said "Alligator."

So, while I'm here, what about just going back to OSX plain old Leopard?

Can I do this if I do a reset to factory install?

Will that boot out all the snow?

And if so, what I fear is that I have already corrupted my time machine drive with a back up done while this Snow Leopard OS installed... Yeah, when I plugged in the drive to check what it's staturse was, the Macbook just jumped in and performed a new back up -- of this state of affaires.... Scary again.

I was thinking I might be able to go into the drive and erase this one (or perhaps two) backups, but then when I looked there is a document that's very new -- like just at the time this back up was being done -- and it's called something catalog, I think, and I have a gut wrenching feeling that to erase that would be the beginning of a horror show... So, let me not go there just yet...

Wow, that's a lot... Any help on this would just be awesome.

I honestly just rock out hard no my apple products, I'm a long time user, and always do things carefully and with thought, but this is very underwater frozen under the snow black water gator **** for me right this moment in time.

Thank you,
WM