iCloud preferences error - No iCloud Folder in place

Help! Upon a clean install of El Capitan, the system setup kept crashing and restarting every time I entered my iCloud information. So, I bypassed that, and system install finished correctly, but won't let me access iCloud.

I actually have no iCloud folder in my /Users/YOUR-HOME/Library/Application Support/iCloud/Accounts path, so I cannot follow the example others give of deleting accounts content. My Application Support folder has nothing in it related to iCloud, either visible or invisible.

Every attempt to do this, either from internet preferences or iCloud preferences gives the error that there was a problem with preferences, and nothing happens.

I can log into iTunes normally. I set up my gmail fine in internet preferences. It appears only to be the iCloud. As if something prevented the folder from being created early in system instal, and now it won't work at all. I tried creating the directory manually and restarting, but that gave the same error.

I've lost 4 days now, wrestling with El Capitan. I did an upgrade install, which not only didn't work, it killed all my previous software installs, moving them to a "recovered" folder, installing as a new user. I managed to recover all of that, only to have a seriously unstable system. So, I went ahead and did the clean install, which took all night downloading the OS (no matter what I tried, the App Store wouldn't download the installer... just kept thinking about starting, for hours, so I couldn't make a USB boot disk).

Now, it appears to have installed and appears to be stable and working, but has locked me out of iCloud, which *****, because some key information is locked up in there, including all my serial numbers for my installed software...