I had tried unticking the "ignore ownership" button before I wrote the hint and that had had no effect on the ownership as far as I could see. However, with all the comments on this thread saying otherwise I tried out HFS+ on a small flash drive to see if I could work out what had gone wrong when I'd used the HFS+ hard drive.

All of this is on one iMac running 10.4.10 with all software updates applied. There are two users involved: "admin" who is an administrative user, and "fred" (not his real name) who is a standard user.

"admin" HFS+ formats the drive as "hfsplus" and does a "Get Info" on it and unticks the "ignore ownership" button and closes "Get Info". He then puts on a folder called "Users" and creates two folders in "Users" called "admin" and "fred". Using "sudo chown" the ownership of "fred" is set to "fred".
This all works as the comment makers expect. "fred" can't write into Users/admin on hfsplus and can't delete Users/admin. "fred" can write into Users/fred OK.

However, the security of the files are at risk because "fred" can tick the "ignore ownership" of hfsplus in "GetInfo" and then he can delete "/Users/admin". Curiously, if "fred" then tries to untick the "ignore ownership" button the usual "Authenticate" dialogue appears requesting an administrative a name and password.

I can only assume that while I was setting up the HFS+ hard drive I had ticked the ignore ownership in "fred" and had looked at an already open "Get Info" in "admin" and had seen it unticked. Or something like that.

However, given the insecurity I've seen, I feel inclined to stay with UFS format despite the warnings. For the record, iPhoto, iTunes, Photoshop Elements 2 and various other applications seem to work OK using files on the UFS drive. I have tripped over the case sensitivity problem, but in that case it was easily worked around. I rarely use the Classic OS 9 environment and I can be careful to only use files on my start-up disk if I do.

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