ID says no such user, PW says already exists ?!?!

[Rishi Chopra]

This is gonna sound crazy, but:  I got my FreeBSD box up and running and 
decided to add a user account for myself (avoid the perils of working as 
root?)  I added a named account 'rchopra' and everything was honky-dorey.

The following series of events occured and have left me confused and 
unable to use or re-add the 'rchopra' account:


1) I manually added myself to the 'wheel' account, in order to allow 
'su' to root.  Rather than using 'pw', I was under the impression just 
editing the entry in '/etc/group' would work; my entry looked like this:

wheel:*:0:root:rchopra

Was my thinking here correct?  If not, can someone please point out my 
mistake?

2) This action seemed to cause a problem; I attempted to login and su, 
and I was not able to login successfully (my password would not work).  
I attempted to run 'id rchopra' at the command prompt, which returns an 
error:

# id rchopra
'id: rchopra: no such user'

Strangely enough, the '/home/rchopra' directory still exists.

3) OK, no problem right?  Just run 'adduser' and create the account 
again...  Unfortunately, after entering all the information for the user 
account 'rchopra' the system says:

pw: user 'rchopra' already exists
adduser: ERROR: There was an error adding user (rchopra)

This happens if I add 'rchopra' to the 'wheel' group or the 'users' 
group (my only user-defined group so far.)


So what gives?  While I am curious and would like to know what went 
wrong (any illucidation as to what may have caused the error is of 
course appreciated), I would (more importantly) like to get my system 
consistent to the point of being able to add an 'rchopra' user account.  
What steps can I take to remove the (false?) rchopra entry or, 
alternatively, re-active the (working?) rchopra account?

Thanks,
Rishi