How to repair a damaged administrator user account

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Level 1

13 points

How to repair a damaged administrator user account

After a lot of troubleshooting and help here on the forums, I have decided that one user account on my iMac has some serious issues. Etre check was run and after removing a few applications that might be an issue, the last check doesn't really show any issues. yet the system locks up, text in some menus disappear, and the system just acts weird.

I have already created a new account and everything works fine there. What I would like to do is repair the damaged account. But I have no idea how.

I have a 2020 27" iMac running MacOS 12.6. One would think there is an Apple document that describes how to at least do some moderate repairs on a single user account, but I have been unable to locate this. I found one article online which was written in 2020, but I am not sure if everything done there is the same in MacOS 12.x.

Part of me thinks I should just wait for Ventura and hope the upgrade repairs everything. Another part of me is concerned that it will jut carry forward the errors.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

iMac

Posted on Sep 27, 2022 1:46 PM

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Answer 1

HWTech

Level 9

68,534 points

Sep 28, 2022 12:47 PM in response to TBade

Chances are it could be a Login item or maybe even a corrupt .plist preference file for something in that user account or perhaps a corrupt cache file. Try booting into Safe Mode which will prevent third party apps (even some Apple drivers) from launching automatically during boot & login. If this works fine, then most likely it is a Login item for that user account. You can see the Login items set to launch for that user account by going into the "Users & Groups" System Preferences. Sometimes just booting into Safe Mode and rebooting normally can fix things because Safe Mode does delete some temp & cache files.

Trying to figure out anything else is just trial and error since we cannot experience what is actually occurring within that account, plus sometimes it is about noticing something seemingly insignificant or even curious to help point you to where to look.

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Answer 2

dialabrain

Level 10

135,635 points

Sep 27, 2022 1:50 PM in response to TBade

FWIW, I think it would be best to move any data from the troublesome account to the new working account then just delete the old one.

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Answer 3

Barney-15E

Level 10

122,084 points

Sep 27, 2022 4:06 PM in response to TBade

I have a 2020 27" iMac running MacOS 12.6. One would think there is an Apple document that describes how to at least do some moderate repairs on a single user account, but I have been unable to locate this.

That would imply they know what is damaged and what needs to be repaired. If that were known, it would likely repair itself.

You can run First Aid on the drive, but that’s about all the repair that could be done.

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Answer 4

TBade Author

Level 1

13 points

Sep 29, 2022 8:15 AM in response to HWTech

Thanks for the suggestions. With the literally thousands of .plists and other files, it would be very difficult to locate the issue as you said. At this point I plan to just move me important files and delete the corrupt account. Thanks for the thoughts.

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