Disappearing configurations?

Is he using an alias to boot up the sign-on (or any other) program? If so, check what happens when he opens say, Eudora, by opening the program directly and then the settings. Maybe he has more than one copy of one of these programs on his drive and a maverick one is being opened. (If he has a duplicate, make sure he gets rid of one of them.)

Does he use Internet Config?

Rifty

He IS using an alias of PPP to sign on, yes...but he's not using an alias of Eudora. We'll take a look at that and get back to you.

Did you check the filesystem recently, i.e. run Disk Doctor or something similar?

Multiple copies of applications will not cause this problem.  All settings for PPP, Netscape, Eudora, etc. are stored in preference files within the preferences folder inside the system folder.

If the disk was locked, the settings files were corrupt, or some other problem made saving the settings fail, you would be seeing error messages about it.  If this were the case you would probably know it by now.

Are you on a machine in a university computing center or some other managed network?  Administrative utilities are sometimes implemented which, upon restart, erease all files added to the drive, refreshing it to a known-clean state for the next user.  Somehow those preferences files are being removed, forcing the applications to use their default settings.

Sorry...not on a network. BUT I like preference files as a direction to explore. So how else could the preferences get wiped? The guy's wife also uses the machine and it's clear neither of them know much about it, so she MIGHT be doing something...but what?