The problem was caused because each user has a userid, and under the unix permissions system everything is owned by a user. When you deleted the user, all those items became orphaned. I'm not a unix sysadmin but I believe that normally when a user leaves a company, their account will be switched off, their home directory file ownerships may be changed but their user account will stick around for some time to avoid such problems. Normal users ofcourse don't matter, but when that user has admin priviledges and had set up the machine, problems as you have found out can occur.
The solution if you haven't found one so far is to chown each pertinent file the old user owned.
Goodluck,
Brooke ::angel::
