I don't see you mentioning you ran
When you reboot your machine, Slackware will activate the quota system for you - you might want to check if a reboot helps discovering that you forgot stuff in the middle. Read
/etc/rc.d/rc.M to see the chain of commands that activate Slackware's quota.
Now, the problems you ran into with users and processes no longer being able to access your root partition. Could they be related to changed permissions on the root directory? The command
Code:
chmod 755 / ; chown root:root /
will fix broken access permissions and ownership of the root directory.