Massive OS X sluggishness after restoring accounts from a failed HD

I have an OS X machine whose HD went tits up. Thankfully I had a backup so I was able to restore the necessary user accounts. The problem is that I copied the old user account folders (/Users/*) from the backup directly to the freshly installed OS X on the new hard drive, and now OS X is incredibly slow whenever I use those accounts. Everything works but every time I click on a menu there is a three-to-five second delay accompanied by the spinning beach ball. Then the menu will pop up, if I click off and click on another menu then the same delay occurs again. This had never occurred on the old drive, actually the computer was quite fast. I tried upgrading to OS X Tiger but that offered no improvement to this problem. Interestingly enough the original account that OS X created on the new drive is still present and doesn't have this problem, only the accounts I copied over. I'm fairly certain this happened because I just copied the folders over instead of using the Migration Assistant.

Does anybody have any ideas of what I could do to cure this problem? Thanks.

Bad prefs files.

Nuke the user account and copy ONLY the files needed over.

Start from the OSX cd, tell it to verify permissions, or something similar like that, in the disk utility. You might also be able to do this from inside OSX

Midnight Dream said:

Start from the OSX cd, tell it to verify permissions, or something similar like that, in the disk utility. You might also be able to do this from inside OSX

Click to expand...

You can verify/repair permissions inside of OS X (without booting from the cd) by using disk utility (Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility). You can also use third party software like Cocktail.