Why won't System Preferences save my desktop background folders?

Back up all data.

This procedure will unlock all your user files (not system files) and reset their ownership and access-control lists to the default. If you've set special values for those attributes on any of your files, they will be reverted. In that case, either stop here, or be prepared to recreate the settings if necessary. If none of this is meaningful to you, you don't need to worry about it.

Step 1

If you have more than one user account, and the one in question is not an administrator account, then temporarily promote it to administrator status in the Users & Groups preference pane. You can demote it back to standard status when this step has been completed.

Launch the Terminal application in any of the following ways:

☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)

☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.

☞ Open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Terminal in the icon grid.

Drag or copy — do not type — the following line into the Terminal window, then press return:

sudo chflags -R nouchg,nouappnd ~ $TMPDIR.. ; sudo chown -R $UID:20 ~ $_ ; chmod -R -N ~ $_ 2> /dev/null

Be sure to select the whole line by triple-clicking anywhere in it. You'll be prompted for your login password, which won't be displayed when you type it. You may get a one-time warning not to screw up. You don't need to post the warning. If you don’t have a login password, you’ll need to set one before you can run the command.

The command will take a noticeable amount of time to run. Wait for a new line ending in a dollar sign (“$”) to appear, then quit Terminal.

Step 2

Boot into Recovery by holding down the key combination command-R at startup. Release the keys when you see a gray screen with a spinning dial.

When the OS X Utilities screen appears, select Utilities ▹ Terminal from the menu bar. A text window opens.

In the Terminal window, type this:

resetpassword

That's one word with no spaces. Then press return. A Reset Password window opens. You’re not going to reset a password.

Select your boot volume ("Macintosh HD," unless you gave it a different name) if not already selected.

Select your username from the menu labeled Select the user account if not already selected.

Under Reset Home Directory Permissions and ACLs, click the Reset button.

Select  ▹ Restart from the menu bar.

This setting is held in the desktop preferences file, which if corrupt will not save settings; however, you can remove it and have the system build a fresh one.

To do this, go to the Finder and select the "Go" menu. Then press the Option key to reveal your user library, and choose the library. Then go to the Preferences folder within the library and locate the file called "com.apple.desktop.plist." Move this file to the Desktop or otherwise out of the Preferences folder, and then log out and log back in. Your desktop backgrounds will be reset to default images, but you should then be able to make your modificaitons and have them stick.

Open the "Console" utility in the /Applications/Utilities/ folder, and select "All Messages" in its sidebar. Then try accessing the desktop system preferences as you did in that video, and see if any errors pop up in the console. To reduce the potential for console clutter, first quit all open programs.

Odd...the console indicates an error with the Dock process' handling of the desktop picture, though I'm not sure if this is related to the issue at hand. You can try clearing the Dock's preferences file to see if that helps the problem. Go to the Finder's "Go" menu, hold the Option key and then select the Library from this menu. Then go to the Preferences folder and move the file called "com.apple.dock.plist" to the desktop. Then log out and log back in to see if the problem persists. If it does, then you can restore the prior Dock setup by placing the file back in the Preferences folder (replacing the newer one) and then logging out and back in.

Please select  ▹ About This Mac ▹ More Info ▹ System Report from the menu bar. Under Hardware Overview, what do you have for the following?

This may be a fault with the use of multiple displays. I found another account of this issue here: http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1463098

...which suggests its improperly applying some setting to multiple displays in the system. Have you recently used multiple displays with your system?

Odd...the console errors are also happening on my system; however, the problem of the folders not sticking is not occurring. Here are my console entries:

12/27/12 3:19:00.823 PM Dock[262]: DesktopPicture: sent notification for space and display 0x0 that does not exist

12/27/12 3:19:00.847 PM System Preferences[88693]: Could not restore selection, using default folder

...happens when I both add or remove folders from the Desktop pictures list, but any added folders persist. So it is likely not related to these entries. Hmm...

What version is the System Preferences program on your system (get info on it in the Applications folder to see this)?