[QUOTE=tharding]I am the only user account on my laptop and it is an admin account. As far as I am concerned I should have complete access to everything on my machine. Am I incorrect?

when you haven't change something yes, but there exists much more users and also a superuser. you can find more about all the users and roots in osx and unix manual about system administration.

a system like osx works with user and group permissions. create a second acount on your system and then you can see, that you as user can't look into the other private user folders (just some public folders). you can't open this, you can't write, read....

this is really extended unix/osx system administration....

have look at this links:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=24597-en
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.h...tnum=106712-en