Finder won't remember icon positions

Hi,

the finder on my imac has stopped remembering the position of my icons- I can arrange them fine but every time I reboot, they are jumbled up again. It also won't remember the window background colour.

A quick search of the forums reveals this is a common problem. One of the suggestions was to set the ownership of the the hard drive to me (ie. the current user). I did this and it worked for a while but now the problem is back and worse than ever. Before it was just the hard drive window, now it is my home folder as well.

I suspect it is either a corrupted cache file or a corrupted preference file. Does anyone know which files I should delete?

Thanks,

Ben