How to Delete a "Ghost" User Account

I work on a Power Mac G4 running 10.3.9 on the job. Of the 5 Macs running OSX in our Department (one being my supervisors Powerbook, the other four are desktops) we have each machine setup with only one user account and each user is the machine's administrator account.

Somehow, my station ended up with two user accounts. The main one (the admin) and what I will call a "ghost" account since it turned up out of nowhere. I cannot delete it (the "minus" button is greyed out) and when I go to my hard drive > users > the only folders you see in the Users folder is the main account and "Shared".

The strange thing is the account I can't delete is my Supervisor's Powerbook Account, as if it was seen over the network or something. He's a good friend, so it's not like he added it to control my machine, and he's curious how it got there as well.

I know we use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone all our stations to a portable external hard drive for emergency backups and maybe something happened there that added the "ghost". But, since all the stations have been cloned, it's weird that the "ghost" user only appeared on my station.

I tried booting up off the OSX install CD and repairing disk and permissions and even changing the password on this "ghost" account. Is there anything else I need to try, like deleting a preference somewhere?

PowerBook G4, Mac OS X (10.4.5), My first Mac was a IIcx. Those were the days!

Posted on Apr 27, 2006 7:45 AM

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5 replies

Apr 27, 2006 11:08 AM in response to Carl Jerris

Carl:

Thank you for responding.

Very curious, indeed!

1) no such preference file could be found in any of the computer's preference or preferencepane folders

2) As I noted above, if I go to my users folder, the only folders within that are the main user (me: the administrator) and "Shared". The only place I see this other user is if I log out and log back in or when I open the Accounts System Preferences Application

PowerBook G4 Mac OS X (10.4.5) My first Mac was a IIcx. Those were the days!

Apr 27, 2006 11:31 AM in response to rmgman

So the account is listed in Accounts but there is no folder in the user folder.

It's like the opposite of how it is supposed to work. Usually if you delete a user the folder remains in a separate folder but not the Accounts administrator.

What happens if you use the find function and look for visible and invisibles with the name of your ghost user and/or even the name of the ghost's user's documents (ask your supervisor for the name of a document on his computer).

See if it can be located. If so, there will be a path.

Apr 27, 2006 2:46 PM in response to Carl Jerris

Carl:

I tried what you suggested and found an invisible file located in

Hard Drive > Private > ETC > HTTPD > USERS

and it had the file name extension .conf

I deleted that (Had to unlock it first), but that didn't solve the problem.

Guess I'll keep searching.

FYI: this is not effecting the performance of my work station. It's just has me annoyed.

PowerBook G4 Mac OS X (10.4.5) My first Mac was a IIcx. Those were the days!

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How to Delete a "Ghost" User Account

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