Settings that don't stick

[MR ZenWiz]

I have an interesting situation that sometimes threatens to drive me
up the wall.

On my Dell workstation, if I change a setting in an app, say which
mode to run in the calculator, it remembers the next time I run the
calculator that it was last in Programming mode (for example).  On my
home-built desktop, it never remembers any such settings and always
runs in the minimal calculator mode unless I change it every time.
Why would this be the case?

OTOH, in the document viewer, no matter what I tell it to do,
including "Save Current Settings As Default," it won't.  But, on the
Dell it will remember for each document what the last view setting was
and use that (if I "Save" them as noted), whereas on my desktop, it
refuses to remember any settings at all.

I think these two are related, but I'm beat as to why the two systems
work in different ways (same installation disk, both systems fully up
to date, etc.).

Clues?