file save problems

[dom123]

Hi,
I have relatively new imac with about 230 Gig free space but after the drama of removing 4 Ghost files from my desktop now i can't save anything to anything???

Some Background...

My sister in law downloaded 4 word documents to my desktop (logged on as me Administrator)

Turns out there are a couple of characters which windows allows in filenames but Mac doesn't so when the files saved the illegal characters were replaced with "%20".

As a result the Os didn't know how to manage the files, one minute they would appear then next dissappear etc.. etc..

Also i couldn't save any files to the desktop or anywhere else as i kept getting a error -43 message.

After some searching i found out how to delete the files using Terminal.

I typed..

cd Desktop

sudo rm Filename%20.doc

One by one the four files were deleted Yay!!!

Thinking myself very clever i restarted my mac and opened text editor typed a few characters and then went file Save as into desktop

words to the effect "File cannot be saved" appear.

Same thing for Word and Excel files i attempt to save in any directory!!!

I cant save any files anywhere and the error message is meaningless???

Everything else appears fine, all programmes load/operate no worries - just can't save any data.

Can anyone explain what has happened and how i might fix this????

[j2bryson]

Did you ever find a solution to this?

My new Air just decided stop letting applications save to Desktop, but from the terminal I can touch files there so I don't understand what's going on. But my browser (SeaMonkey) is useless for reading attachments without having write permission to Desktop, that's where it puts temp files.