The second situation, while someone might answer you here, you may get better help in Mint's forum.
Probably that ~/.dmrc is owned by another user.
Login as root (or however you folks do with sudo) and run something like

chown user:user .dmrc

replacing 'user' with the one who should own the file.

While trying to "fix" one of the user accounts on my flash drive's Maya XFCE user accounts (accidentally deleted it's Public folder and any new folder I make under the same name lacks the profile icon other Public folders have, so I suppose it really isn't a real one). Now whenever I boot up or switch users, I get a box reading; "User's $Home/.dmrc file is being ignored. This prevents the default session and language from being saved. User's $Home directory must be owned by user and not writable by other users."

Any hints to this techie newbie how to remedy both situations? Thanks!

Jim in NYC