Issue with new users home directories

[drit008]

Has anyone any light to spread on this issue?

Using Imaging, and pushing down a configuration nets me with a machine that is unusable.

Basically what happens is that any new users that logon to the machine, get ~/Library/Keychains as a file of 0 bytes instead of a directory. Many other directories including Mail are also files of 0 bytes. This results in large numbers of errors by those applications trying to create directories but stopping because a file already exists.

Normally you would assume that your English.lproj template is broken, however the template has no such files contained within it.

I thought that the process of creating new users copied English.lproj across into a new /Users/*username* directory. Obviously there are other parts of the process which I don't know!

Where do I look to debug next?

[Look]

I fixed just the Keychains issue by manually create an empty folder /System/Library/User Template/English.lproj/Library/Keychains
This seems to get copied across and prevents the creation of the offending zero k item.
I presume the same fix would work for other zero k files that preventing folder creation as well, no idea as to the underlying cause though.

[bentoms]

I never directly edit the user template.

Always used Casper's Fill User Template (FUT), instead.

Can you post your revisions?

[Look]

I guess if you created a pkg that contained an empty ~/Library/Keychains directory and then selected FUT it might work...
I just used a policy to run a command line to create the missing folder... Something along the lines of
mkdir /System/Library/User Template/English.lproj/Library/Keychains
I then scoped this to any broken machine, it didn't fix existing users (did this manually by deleting the offending file) but it did seem to fix the issue for any future new users.
If you wanted to be technically correct you might put it in a script and check if it already exists before attempting to create it, but I was just after a quick fix.