> Anyway, you won't believe this, but I contacted Canon and they suggested I run disk permissions. I did that from the regular old disk utility on my Mac, and voila! It is now working.
You've become the forgotten person in your own thread, Rita, so three things...
1. The "regular old disk utility on my Mac" is where you always want to repair permissions from; it's the most up-to-date vehicle (unless you're still running the version of OS X with which your Mac shipped, in which case it's OK to run it from you're restore disc).
2. It may be too late, but would you please hit command-L in Disk Utility and see if you can maybe post what it repaired?
3. To avoid forgetting my test account p/w, as you may have done, I use the same p/w for both my main and test accounts.
If a p/w is safe enough for the account with all your stuff, why not use it for the account with nothing, too? (Actually, I delete and recreate my test account following every log-in, so it's always pristine.)
