Creating New Folders and Saving from Applications dialogues acting weird

I have spent the last couple weeks getting our new Intel Xserve ready for production and of course at the last minute started seeing some strange things when I try to save files from inside an application.

The first thing I noticed is that within an application Save dialogue, if I click on “new folder” and give it a name, it immediately jumps to the folder at the bottom of the list instead of automatically selecting the new folder. I can’t select the new folder unless I click around on other folder names first. Strange things happen like jumping to names I haven’t clicked on and multiple folders becoming highlighted but after a few seconds it clears and I can save to the new folder.

I also discovered that when I first open the save dialogue, the hierarchy shows the User name selected at the top of the directory where network normally displays rather than the share point. I also sometimes see the top of the directory pointing towards the local Users folder in the list of volumes available. In this same instance, I can’t initially select the volume I want until I click around on other volume names. Things jump around and even sometimes show multiple volumes selected. Eventually it stops and I can select the volume name.

I checked and the files and folders I eventually created have the right premissions so I am at a loss. Most of the directories and files were copied over from the Sun Server. I used propagate to hopefully make sure all the permissions are correct. Every file and folder I have checked seems to be OK.

I have an XRaid 7 x 500gb, RAID 5. I partitioned it into 6 volumes to match our old workflow on a Sun Server, and set up each of these as a share point as follows: ACL off, inherit permissions from Parent, owner rw, staff rw, everyone rw. Network mount is off because I wasn’t sure what it did (yeah, I’m a newbie). All the users are in the staff group.

I turned off all the default shares (Groups, Users, netboot,etc.) that came with the initial Xserve setup because I didn’t want to confuse the users. Was this a bad thing?

This happens consistently with different users, macs and both Adobe and Quark applications. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

Bill