Well that could be tricky troubleshooting - the apps using the .config are:
chromium, geany, geeqie,leafpad,nitrogen,pcmanfm2,sakura,smplayer,tint2, transmission, xarchiver,
However the permissions prob seemed quite early on in my build phase since chromium refused to run and geany complained about configuration probs although it still ran ok. That's when I changed the permissions and rebooted with 'persistence'.
Since the main persistent version is running sweetly and the version without persistence runs but with niggles perhaps there is a clunky workaround. Could I, for example, create a file in /home/tc/.X.d that simply ran the command 'sudo chown -R tc:staff /home/tc/.config' and then convert it to an extension to be mounted from the /tce/optional folder? This might be the quickest fix for now.
I'm just not sure how you might convert '/home/tc/.X.d/chngpm_config', say, into an extension that would mount at boot time.