User profile confusion

gilloz · 10 Apr 2014

This morning my computer would not let me login. I would get the message: "The User Profile Service service failed the login. User Profile cannot be loaded". I had to use my second computer to get Online to figure out how I could fix this. After finding a solution in working with the Registry, my original computer was working again, except my profile looks like I just loaded a fresh Windows 7. Under User's profile window I show 3 user's profile. The default profile, dated 1 year ago, and two identical named profile, one dated yesterday and the other dated today. The profile dated yesterday is bigger than the one dated today. How can I change the profile dated yesterday as my Default profile? In other words, how can I make my computer look like it did yesterday. Really need some help here. Thanks.

Brink · 10 Apr 2014

Hello Gilloz,

A user profile is a collection of settings that make the computer look and work the way you want it to for a user account. It contains the account's settings for desktop backgrounds, screen savers, pointer preferences, sound settings, and other features. User profiles ensure that your personal preferences are used whenever you sign in to Windows.

A user profile is different from a user account, which you use to sign in to Windows. Each user account has at least one user profile associated with it.

User Profile Service failed the logon. User profile cannot be loaded.

To restore the old user profile for your user account, you would unfortunately need to manually set everything back to how it was.

gilloz · 12 Apr 2014

Thanks Brink for your response. Well, after fiddling with the User accounts and User Profiles, I manged to get my system half working in that my Desktop looked like I just installed a fresh copy of Windows 7. All of my icons were gone, both on the Desktop and Quick Launch bar. After a day I got my Desktop partially back. But, when going to my Windows Explorer and looking at C:/Users, I have 5 users now. I only had 2 prior to this whole problem. That was Default and (myname). The other 3 are (myname.myname), (myname.mynamePC) and (myname.mynamePC000). This is where I am right now and my computer is acceptable for now.