El Capitan update problem

[newt@vims.edu]

I updated my iMac to 10.11.2. My primary account works fine and has administrator access. My wife's account won't log in (it just gets a spinning gear, forever). This same thing happened when I went to 10.11.1. I had to do a clean install and migrate from my bootable backup to clear the problem.
Is there any way to avoid that time consuming hassle this time?

- Newt -
Newton J. Munson
Chief Technology Officer (retired)
Virginia Institute of Marine Science
The College of William and Mary
phone: (804) 815-2999

 

[NoBoMac]

Create a new account for the wife. Sign in to see if everything working ok (ie. Signs in relatively fast). Copy over everything other than her old Library folder. Then the tricky part: most likely something in her prefences/setup in Library that might be making things slow. Can try to piecemeal copy over items from Library. Or maybe easier to reconfigure things one at a time. Or copy over Library in total, and if can sign in ok, done. Otherwise, back to reconfigure or piecemeal.

 

[newt@vims.edu]

Create a new account for the wife. Sign in to see if everything working ok (ie. Signs in relatively fast). Copy over everything other than her old Library folder. Then the tricky part: most likely something in her prefences/setup in Library that might be making things slow. Can try to piecemeal copy over items from Library. Or maybe easier to reconfigure things one at a time. Or copy over Library in total, and if can sign in ok, done. Otherwise, back to reconfigure or piecemeal.

It is not that the account is slow. I simply can't log into the account. I left it spinning overnight and it was still spinning in the morning.

 

[NoBoMac]

Basically same thing. Since you can sign in on your account, most likely nothing wrong with hardware or the upgrade to El Capitan itself. There's something in the wife's configuration that's causing issues. Corrupt preferences, excessively large databases (eg. mail files, calendars, photo library, iTunes), incompatible 3rd party program/extensions. Hard to tell. Hence, create a new account an restore bits and pieces to the new account.

It happens. Plenty of threads on Macrumors with same problem, different versions of OS. And at times, not even upgrading to a new version, just stopped working (again, usually some new software installed, corrupt ~/Library file).