MacOS – HSTS.plist – anyone know what this is about/from

If I understand your question correctly, you're attempting to reset the permissions on a user's home directory. This is easily accomplished by resetting ACLs on the desired home directly by using the Reset Password Utility in the Recovery Partition:

1. Restart your computer from the recovery partition (if running Lion) or the gray disk (if not running Lion).

2. Open Disk Utility and run a permissions repair on your startup volume. After this is complete, close Disk Utility. We're doing this just for good measure.

3. Open Terminal from the Utilities menu. Type in resetpassword and select your user account (NOT System Administrator/root) from the drop down menu.

4. Click the Reset button at the bottom of the window in the Reset home folder permissions and ACLs section.

5. Quit the Password Utility and go back to the main recovery screen.

6. On your keyboard, hit ⌘ + Q and restart your computer. It's very important that you don't hold down the power button to exit the recovery session, or the ACL reset won't occur.

Good luck!

This seems to be a strange issue. So I do not have any solutions to fix them as it exists on the system. Before you proceed, ensure that you create a backup (using Time Machine or a disk cloning tool like Clonezilla, Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper!). In case things get worse, you can at least revert to the last known (better) state.

You can do one or both of the following:

• You can reinstall OS X yourself. Hold Cmd+R on startup to get into Recovery Mode and select the reinstall OS X Mavericks option.
• If you have a backup with Time Machine from before the upgrade, you can also choose Restore From a Time Machine Backup from the recovery options, select the date/time of that backup and go back to OS X Mountain Lion.

Also see OS X: About OS X Recovery to use Recovery Mode (this is applicable from OS X Lion onwards).