Zero: The private dir permissions utilize the same routine as all of the .ini file options and thus are just strings that use names instead of id's. I suppose that format could be extended to support id's for users/groups and when valid users/groups are specified they could be resolved and stored that way. I think it's probably far far easier to just use a user flag though. That's especially true since if you add a new user you would be forced to update all the permissions if you specified them individually and that's probably more likely than the user rename issue.
Yea, I append the extra data to executables so tuff's script works
That's cool, and mentioning that means I probably should provide a TCL version as well for future use.
VFS: it sounds like you're doing nothing fancy at all. That means the problem won't be found easily as it's more likely memory corruption based rather than a simple programming error in the new code I wrote.