The devil is in the details.  What operating system are you running? OS 9 can "lock" files while OS X changes a file's permission to disallow editing, or even reading. I'm guessing you're in OS 9.
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System:
• 2.5 GHz MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo, 4 GB RAM, 200 GB hard drive, runs 10.5.4
• 1.6 GHz iMac G5, 1.5 GB RAM, 250 GB hard drive, runs 10.4.11
• iPhone, 4 GB, OS X 2.0.2 |