Thank you. I copied the .gnome file from another user and then did the comands suggested and voila it worked. Now I can change the backgrounds. Yes. It's the little things like this which can make your day. If I had something like this messed up in windows I would most likely have to reinstall it. so all I had to do is chown -R timothy /home/timothy/.gnome chgrp -R timothy /home/timothy/.gnome
Now all I have to do is find the file which has the gnomecard data and move that back into the directory and good to go. I love it that in Linux you can normally fix things. Try that in windows. As someone said "It's all about permissions." Why the directory size was off I have no idea ,but the problem is fixed. Tim
