Permissions and Widgets

Mac 911 Tip of the Week By Christopher Breen (mac911@macworld.com)
At a recent visit with MacChUG, the Macintosh user group in Chico, Calif., the subject of repairing permissions came up -- specifically the question of why widgets seem to unfailingly have a problem. This is a common enough misconception that I thought I'd tell you what I told the Mac users in Chico.
When you launch Disk Utility, select a volume, click the First Aid tab, and click either Verify Disk Permissions or Repair Disk Permissions you will see a long series of entries that begin "We are using special permissions for the file or directory X," where X is a widget.
If you're a long-time OS X users who's repaired permissions on a regular basis, you may believe that anything that First Aid reports to you should be dealt with. Not in this case.
With the advent off widgets, First Aid has become chattier, much like a barroom companion who drones on and on without ever getting to the point of his long-winded story. In this case, First Aid lists widget after widget, offering that each is using a special permission (33188). The problem is that it fails to sum up the report with a "Oh, and you needn't worry a tinker's damn about these special permissions. You can bang on that Repair Permissions button from her until doomsday and you'll see this same list of entries every time."
In short, feel free to ignore any entry that begins "We are using special permissions."
By the way, if you're looking for information on the ways and means of permissions, be sure to take a look at Brian Tanaka's Take Control of Permissions in OS X, an excerpt from his ebook of the same name appearing at http://www.macworld.com/2006/03/secrets/tcopermissions/index.php/?lsrc=mwweek-0320 .