Users preferences not being saved

[cosmodog at comcast.net]

Any ideas why gnucash would silently fail to save preferences?

I am trying to turn off SXs so gnucash won't hang when starting. But 
the changes I make in the preferences pane are not being retained.  
Even if I do gnucash --nofile and save a new book.  I don't see any 
messages on the xterm or the console complaining about not being able 
to write to the preferences file.  I  became unable to save preferences 
a few weeks ago, before I started having problems with "since last run" 
dragging, but I was just putting up with it. Now I really need to 
figure it out.

I am using gnucash 1.8.9 and xdarwin from fink.

TIA,

Richard