User object not modified

I don't see where in this patch you are updating the reference to the user object. If you fail to modify the user object, the other modules with hook_user that get executed after your module will not be able to make decisions based on the auto-assigned role.

Case in point - you want your new users to be automatically assigned a badge for a specific role. So, when the new account is created, you auto-assign a role of 'Newbie', but when the User Badges module fires its hook_user, it's looking at $user->roles and the auto-assigned role is not there, because you did not modify the $user reference in your hook. Therefore, the badge for that role cannot be assigned to the user.

Does this make sense?

Did you miss the part where I talked about the User Badges module??

To test:

1. Create new role "newbie"
2. Configure Auto Assign role to assign newbie to all new users
3. Configure User Badges module to assign badge to newbie role
4. Register a new user

The result I am seeing is that the new user does not get the badge.

This is not solved. You are still not modifying the $user object. You are updating the role in the database, which is great, but you also have to update $user.

After each role is inserted into the database, you have to:

// Add the auto-assigned role to the user object so that it can be accessed by other hooks
$user->roles[$role->rid] = $role->name;

You do this so that any other module that implements hook_user will have the updated user object without reloading it from the database.

To be more explicit, here is some code from user_badges.module:

function user_badges_user($op, &$edit, &$user, $category = 'account') {
  switch ($op) {
    case 'insert':
      if (is_array($user->roles)){
        // get the list of role badges
        $roles = user_badges_get_roles();
        $badges = user_badges_get_badges('select');
        $message = user_access('manage badges');
        $rids = array_keys($user->roles);
        ...
  }
}

This code executes at some point after your hook_user call on insert. If you dump the $user->roles array, you will not see the auto-assigned role. The reason you don't see the auto-assigned roles is because your code never updates the $user object that's in memory.

Does this make sense?

To fix the problem, I have attached a patch based off the code you instructed me to download.

lauscherli - that was my patch, and I can verify that it works as it's supposed to. My patch on this thread works as well. Feel free to try it and let me know if there are any issues...