System Preferences stuck

I'm posting this issue in case anyone else has a similar problem or has a better solution. I ran into trouble with my System Preferences not retaining changes that I made. For example, if I changed the highlight color under System Preferences > Appearance from blue to green it would accept the change but then revert to the old setting when the System Preferences window was closed and reopened. I tried deleting ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.systempreferences.plist to no avail.

What worked was to change the access privileges on ~/Library/Preferences to 'read and write' for everyone and applied this to the enclosed items. What is strange is that I was then able to then change it back to "read only" for everyone (like it was originally) and it still works fine.