I managed to "break" the desktop folder on our macbook. I'm not sure exactly how it happened, but I'd started to copy an application to the desktop using Terminal, and then thought it wasn't working so quit the copy. Every time I clicked on the Desktop in the Finder, the Finder would thrash and other applications became uncooperative. Clicking on Desktop in the home folder or in the sidebar led to the message that 'there is no default application to open the document "Desktop"...,' which was rather worrying. I managed to copy the folders on the desktop to the home folder, so it was empty but still broken, and anything saved to it would go who-knows-where.I was thinking I might have to do an archive-and-install, which would have been a pain, but then I remembered seeing Apple's article on how to change a user's short name, which involves copying the files from one home folder to another. So I created a new us...

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