Win7 spontaneously started using C:\users\Public as my default profile

Hey all,

My Windows 7 Home Premium x64 spontaneously started using C:\Users\Public as its default profile and as such all my usual settings have turned to poop. Things were working fairly fine but I was having a couple little errors like when I was trying to change my wallpaper so I thought I would do a restart. When it booted back up most of my normal desktop icons had gone. When I booted up Firefox all my usual addons and the way I have it set up was gone or different.

I was concerned as I thought I had lost all my desktop icons so I opened up C:\Users\MY PROPER USER NAME\Desktop and all my icons were sitting in that folder. I right clicked on one of the icons on my desktop and saw that it said it was residing at C:\Users\Public. Also if I open up "my documents" or "my pictures" etc. all my normal stuff isn't there as it is using C:\Users\Public\Documents etc.

I'm also afraid that it'll be using a LOT of wrong settings for my programs as it doesn't seem to be accessing "MY REAL USERNAME\Appdata" for some things (ie. Firefox).

Does anyone know how Windows 7 deals with what profile to access by default? Is there an easy was of changing that? Registry key or something?

Regards.

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A bit more info on how it might have happened:

I had been using my computer perfectly all morning (and it's been flawless for months). Put it to sleep this arvo which is something I don't do very often at all. Woke it back up a few hours later and everything was totally fine. Went to boot up ME3 for the first time and it gave an error saying I must "update to the latest PhysX" error. I downloaded and installed the latest PhysX. The game booted fine. I exited the game, was getting a strange error when I tried to change my wallpaper, thought I would reboot, and ever since it hasn't bee accessing my profile.

Have you tried a system restore to a point in time before this problem occurred?

Other than that, your user profile may be corrupted, so you might want to consider creating a new user accoint before deleting your old one.

I did actually try a restore. All it appeared to do was uninstall PhysX. My normal profile appears to be completely in tact and nothing so far has seemed corrupt, it's just I need to access it manually as it appears to have lost the association with Windows as being the default.

I'm not sure whether it would fix your problem, but you might want to consider a Repair Install.

Repair Install