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User cannot login - lesson learned
All, I am sharing this anecdote because I have not seen a similar incident reported elsewhere and perhaps this will be useful for someone. My Dad called the other day to indicate that he could not log into his computer. I was unable to resolve his problem remotely, so I had him mail the computer to me. This is what I discovered: His machine was infected with some malware. At some point, the AV software (BitDefender Free) determined that his user.dat file was infected and it quarantined the file, i.e., it changed the file's name. Thus, when he tried to log in, the profile was not found and login was denied. Interestingly, the system seems to have created a copy of user.dat on each login attempt, and each one of them was quarantined! To fix this problem: Log into the machine using a different user account, but one with Administrator rights. (Suggestion - always have a second login enabled.) Once logged in, run your favorite anti-malware programs and clean up the computer. This typically requires a reboot or two. When logged in as the secondary account, rename the oldest quarantined version of user.dat.xxxxx to user.dat. Also remove any .TM.bif, .TMContainer0000000000000000000x.regtrans-ms files which were created when the problem occurred. It may also be necessary to edit the registry, see User Profile Error - Logged on with a Temporary Profile. Once all of this was done, his machine ran just fine, with no loss of data, settings, etc.
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