How to properly re-establish users after a reinstall?

[Josef Lowder]

A question about how to properly re-establish the two users that I had
prior to reinstalling my Linux operating system (only the OS in the
"/" partition)?

I had to reinstall because when I tried to install Virtual Box, it
screwed up my system and caused "X" to no longer work. I could get to
the command line, but could not startx.

So, I used the live CD that I had initially used to re-install just
the "/" portion that I had previously installed on /dev/hda5, and I
reformatted only that "/" partition but I *did not* reformat the
"/home" partition that was on /dev/hda7.

In my original installation, I had created two users: /home/joe and /home/patti.

The reinstall process required a user other than root to be created,
so I created user "patti" (because she had nothing crucial to be
protect), but I did not create a new user "joe."

The reinstallation went fine and "X" was restored; and when I examined
the results from the command line, I found all of my original user
files were preserved (curiously in /home/joe/joe) even though I did
not create a new user "joe."

But here's the confusion: I now have two "patti" directories.
One in /home/patti and another in /home/joe/patti.

$ df shows the following file system:
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda5             3.9G  875M  2.8G  24% /
/dev/hda1              10G  4.3G  5.8G  43% /mnt/win_c
/dev/hda7             7.7G  1.6G  6.2G  20% /home/joe

So, my question is, can I just move /home/joe/patti to /home/patti?
And then create a new user "joe" and move the old /home/joe/joe to
/home/joe?

Or is there something different I need to do to make sure that I don't
create problems?

FWIW, I uploaded a survey of the newly reinstalled system's files at
this link: http://www.upquick.com/view/t40.pdf

joe at actionline.com