Renamed SU on Mac, lost Entourage identity...thoughts?

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I've used this MacBook w/OS 10.4.7 and Entourage X for the last two
months. I'm giving the MacBook to my college bound son, and so I
thought I would rename the Super User account (the only account on the
MacBook) to his name. I went to System Preferences, Accounts, and
renamed the account to Isaac from my name. The short name for some
reason stays the same. I changed the password to something he would
remember. Made the changes and shut down the machine and went to bed.
Next morning, I woke up and logged in, and to my sad surprise the
entire user was reset, so that all preferences were gone. Main issue
for this area is that Entourage apparently deleted all traces of me and
reset the identity that was named my name to Isaac. I tried switching
Identies but couldn't find my old one.

I searched this group and read many of the posts about this, and looked
on the hard drive for some older MUD file or other files but it appears
that my identity was reset by this action of renaming the user. On my
hard drive, I show a home folder with my old short name on it, which I
apparently can't change, and a new folder with my son's name on it. The
folder with Isaac's name on it includes much of my old files, my music
and pictures, but nothing that I would see as an old MUD file. The
other folder, a home folder with my name still on it, is basically a
new user setup. Nothing in there other than some basically empty
folders, desktop, documents, library music and pictures.

Is that accurate? Is there no way to return the emails and notes I made
in the last two months? Are there other files I should be looking for?

I haven't tried renaming the user back to my name yet, but wanted to
check first with this group to see if there were ideas on how to
correct this, before making more mistakes.

I'm very surprised that a simple change of the name of the SU could
reset everything with a loss of data. This doesn't seem to be just MS's
issue, as Firefox lost all my preferences, as did everything else. Once
I solve this problem, I'll post to a more general Apple Discussion
forum. If this is accurate, meaning that renaming the SU resets all SU
settings, this is very disturbing. I've been a heavy Windows user and
administrator for NT 4 and Windows 2000 Server for over 11 years, and
I've never encountered this, though that doesn't mean that it may be
possible. I used to do UNIX admin and can't remember ever seeing this
happen back then, but it was a while ago on Solaris systems.

Any help here on this?

.

Relevant Pages

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