Michael Bigley paused, thought it over, and spoke thusly: >>I've seen that before. Unfortunately, it was quite a while ago. You >>mentioned the 'normal' setup and the fact that the startup process >>was much quicker as 'root'. Do you have anything that appears under >>Login Items, in System Preferences? > >yes, but deleting all of them makes no difference in startup time... Strange. I like Lisbeth's idea, move your apps and Docs, carefully, in chunks, into one of your other user's accounts, or set up a new one, and trash the old account and all associated files. This 'trashing almost has to be done with the rm command in Terminal. ~flipper