Could not move anything from one folder to another without entering a p/w. ... But it didn't go away when I ran Disk Utility which should have fixed permissions, right?
It sounds like you needed to repair home folder, not system, permissions, which, in Lion and later, is done from your recovery partition...instructions
here.
The auto update thing doesn't really make sense because when I got it back from her, the indicator that there were updates, the thing I told her not to do, was still at two updates. I think because I don't know what Mavericks looks like, I took the 'Genius's word when we picked it up (I always have all the proprietary Apple tests done before I take a MBP home now) that it was running Lion as I requested and she didn't want to bother downgrading it, or worse, it can't be. Happily, I'm escalated to Tier 2 Support so if this can be fixed, it will. I would just pull the drive, cable it externally and put Lion on it through a clean download, but it would void the AppleCare. I think I'm going to have to go back and find a different Genius.
I don't get it!
According to Mactracker, a 13" June 2012 MBP shipped with OS X 10.7.4 (Lion) and can run the latest release of OS X, so why would Apple give you the refurb with anything other than either Lion or Yosemite? (Mt. Lion was close to a year old when I bought my 2010 Apple refurb [in 2013, from Small Dog], and it came with OS X 10.6.3, with which it originally shipped.)
With that in mind, I can't see why reverting the OS would void AppleCare...nor can I see why you'd need to pull the HDD to do it.
By all means, please keep us posted.
