Apologies for your frustration.
I saw your question when you first posted it, and was honestly, a bit blank over it, so left it for someone else to answer. The forum moves that fast, it dropped off the recent posts page very quickly, and, again, with brutal honesty... I forgot all about you
A bump such as you have done is a good idea in these cases.
So, to your question... I may still not be much help here, but it may provoke some more helpful responses. For the record, I don't use a MAC, so if any of this stuff is different on a MAC, someone who knows really needs to jump in...
I am talking about the columns like album name, artist, track, genre etc.
Got it. Could you expand a little (screenshot is the best) on where you see this problem? Is it everywhere? Library views? Panes or categories view? Playlists views?
Every time I open MC23 MAC the columns are back to the original config. I can save my preset, select it, close MC23 & when I reopen it, the same album has the old column config.
This doesn't sound right, and is probably why you've received no response so far. Normally, once you set your columns, either manually or by applying a saved preset, they stick. My gut feeling is that whatever is causing this issue for you has to be something at your end, rather than an issue with MC itself, otherwise, there would be a lot more noise on the forum about it.
eureka moment? Are you using an MC client connecting to an MC server? If so, then this is exactly the behaviour I would expect. To make your change persistant, you would need to make it on the server instance of MC, and this would then be pushed out to all connecting clients, everytime they connect. If you're not in a server/client situation, then we're back to "This doesn't sound right..."
The "Eureka moment" came as I thought about where MC saves these things, and I'm almost certain that they're a part of the library, and you must have write access to your library folder otherwise you would be seeing a whole world of other issues. If you're not client/server, I'm pretty much out of ideas here.
The "Auto size columns" needs to be selected each time as well & I have it checked in "Tree & View". What am I missing?
Client/server setup? See, I'm pinning all my hopes on this being the case here
Also have a look at "Tree & View > Advanced > allow auto size to cut off long values"
I believe it's checked by default, maybe, you don't want that?
-marko.