In a very long story short, today I fixed a customer's issues by redirecting their server log in so it authenticated correctly... Well, instead of calling me for an answer, he thought he'd just save the company some money and created a new user, in hopes of bypassing what I had just done.
For those confused, I created a launcher that repointed our samba network from smb://server/storage to smb://<user>@server/storage. This fixed the other issue they had with the files not working with their windows machines, but this is not a windows issue.
Furthermore, in creating the new user, he happened to create it in the same home directory as the first. The problem being we renamed how the 1st account appeared but didn't change the home directory, that worked fine, but he didn't realize this, hence the 2 users, 1 directory issue... My question is this: Is there any way to save all the items from the home directory, or is it a lost cause? He has his whole VMware settings, which took him a long time to set up, a couple of files, and some other things in that file that we would love to recover so we don't have to recreate the wheel.
Any help would be greatly appreciated. We have a windows xp pro disk standing by just in case, but we'd rather not go that route, even though the whole rest of the office is windows except the server.

Thank you,

I'm not sure I understand the problem.

Do you have user1 and user2, each with different user IDs? And is there now one home directory for the two users?

Can't you just clone the directory? Something like this (as root), if user1 owns it?
And then each user deletes the the other's stuff from his directory?

Actually, Yes! that's exactly it! I HAD 2 users with different IDs and only one single root. So, I went throught the command line and created user 3 so i could actually access the machine to confirm my suspicions of what had happened. Sure enough user 1 and 2 had the same home directory... Like I said, I was not the one who made the users as they were trying to save their company money. I have tried using
as well as
I'm trying to set everything back to the original user, I went through and changed the home directory of user2 to no file then deleted it, therefore preserving the "shared" home directory. I use the term "shared" because they both used the same directory and not because it was actually shared.

Also, while doing the chown, as root, I ran into an interesting error stating it could not preform the action, any ideas?

Thank you for your help,

That depends what the error message says.

But if you were trying to operate on a directory while that directory was the current directory, you may get an error. Try to cd out of the directory and try again (if applicable).

If you started an application, such as emacs, while that directory was current, the application probably still sees it as current, so you might have to close the application first.

Well, I was doing the changes as root rather then a user. I believe the message was "operation not permitted" which is what confused me. I'm getting into it by pressing "esc" while it boots up, choosing the version to boot into, then hitting "a." then I log in as root and proceed with the commands. I hate to say it, but I've got one other thing I thought of to try, if that doesn't work, they have requested I put windows xp back on it. Thank you very much for your help Ken, but I will be sure to let you know what happens if I figure it out.

Thank you very much,
Tony H.