Freshly created Account is Admin-Account by Default.

and any freshly created account with a different name (be it only one letter) is created as a Standard account and can be converted to an Admin account and back.

Hi Linc,

apologies, I forgot to mention there are two other Admin accounts.

I read through tons of threads first before I posted this question. Beleive me, its a tricky one.

Rolling the dice I´d guess that there must be some hidden information - possibly corrupted - which "remembers" that old account. Using bord tools I am at the end. sigh.

Impossible. As mentioned earlier: On creation of the account it is a Administrator account and there is no way to change this: The checkbox "User is allowed to administer this computer" is always grayed out.

The original account had been fully erased, all files deleted, than permissions repaired.

Than a new account is created.

This newly created account given an username that existed before is set up as an Admin account - and this cannot be changed in the UI.

A new newly created account given a different name (that never existed on that system) however is a limited account and can be modified as wanted.

The system seems to remember these older account names.

Output on the command line confirms what I described above. My new account is member of the admin group.

yes, all were listed.

Yes.

I am logged in as "SteveTemp" which is temporary account in order to fix things.

First I reran the dscl command from above. Same result: root Steve Admini

Than I ran this command for user Steve.

Result: "SteveTemp" is not in the sudoers file.

In addition I did some more testing: A newly created account that has a name different from the account name e. g. Steve and stevesomething is not affected by this problem. Then I deleted that again and checked other names that had been present in the system earlier - and voila - Admin only.

I could use this as a workaround now but I suspect that there is something in the background that may affect integrity of my account structure.

System replied "record was not found". Spelling double checked.

Linc, thank your very much for your support, highly appreciated.

However, I did create a new account with a different name as a standard account and copied folder by folder from my backups. That seems to work. The subject seems complex and I have maintained my user account since mac os 8.5 or so. So even on mac os x there may be time to refresh an user account, where I do run complex scripts and databases like DevonThink Pro.

Again thank you and all the best.

Steve.