Application folder strangeness

[iSteve]

Hello again

We're using Mac OS 10.5.4 in one of our IT suites, with preferences managed by a 10.5.4 server. Our set-up in this room is experiencing some strange issues....

A student will log in, but have a no entry sign on their Applications folder on the local machine. This only happens to a few students, but is not tied to a particular kid or particular machine!

The permissions of the folder are as you would expect - everyone can read but not write. Some students can work on the machine, then 30 mins later, they get a no entry sign on the Apps folder.

Has anyone seen this happen before? We're at a bit of a loss here as we cannot make it happen consistently and permissions etc are fine?

[bbrook]

Not one I've heard of before, but like a lot of strange permission-related problems I've had in the past, have you tried repairing permissions through Disk Utility (/Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility - though you'll need to be logged in as a local admin account if you can't access the Applications folder)?

[iSteve]

Turns out this issue was due to a flakey AD plugin with 10.5.4 and the way we'd joined machines using a script to bodge binding. The machine looses it's bindings on and off, meaning it doesn't know who's logged in, and refuses access randomly to shares and so forth. Problem is resolved with a new plug in in 10.5.5. We're aiming to push out a new image to our Macs over Xmas so this will solve our problem!