chown & chmod is mess up
 

when I untar something, the user and group name is wrong. also the chmod is dwxr-s-r-x for a folder. any way I can fix this?

i'm seeing couple of passwd files that I did not create
passwd- passwd.lock passwd,v

Try:
chown -R user:group /path/to/dir
find -type d -exec chown a+rx,o+w,g+s {} \;