Windows 7: logged in with temporary profile

Windows 7 Ultimate - I have admin account, my wife has her own account, and her profile appears to be corrupt. When she logs in we see the error message "you have been logged in with a temporary profile".

Initially, restarting solved this problem for her but now it's happening every time.

I've seen 2 solutions offered, 1 that says delete her profile key with regedit, and another that says run sfc /scannow.

Anyone have a definitive solution to this yet? Was hoping MSFT would release a "profile repair tool" considering how frequent this problem appears to be.

thanks.
c

Hello Barney,

This can help fix it for you.

User Profile Error - Logged on with a Temporary Profile - Vista Forums

Yeah, this is the link that says delete the account profile SID key, while in safe mode. I'll try this tonight.

Not a guaranteed fix but; I have corrected this by renaming the apparently corrupt profile folder and letting Windows create a new one. Any data you need will still be in the old profile folder so you can copy it over.

Again, not a guarantee, but easy enough to try.

Good Luck with it.

The deleting SID key trick does not work, for Windows 7 at least. I deleted for bad user profile then logged out and back in only to find same problem. Also tried it then rebooted to no avail. Both times checked regedit again and the SID key is never recreated.

I'm now copying /user contents to new user.

Sorry to hear that. Sometimes it's best to create a new user account to not have to worry about it being corrupted.

Please let us know how it went.

creating new user was easy, just created newuser1, copied contents from /users/corrupteduser into /users/newuser1, then deleted corrupteduser.

That's great news Barney. You may need to create new shortcuts for your programs though.