Windows 7: Temporary profile - urgent help needed

Given my prior bad experiences with managing my new Windows 7 box, i decided to be uber careful before doing anything system related. So, before doing anything, I created a restore point then restored my computer.

The good news is that the restore worked. The bad news is that my profile got hosed.

Looking on-line for solutions, I have found several ideas:

• Log-out/in and/or reboot: this has not resolved the problem
• Log in as admin, run regedit, navigate to HKLM\software\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurentVersion\Profilelist, remove the .bak from the profile: this has not resolved the problem

On VistaForums, there is a tutorial for dealing with this problem. However, the tutorial raises some questions: The tutorial says (step 1) delete the the user account and (step 8) delete the registry key with .bak (which, has the path to the correct user folder - the non-.bak points to c:/users/temp). The question is this: What happens on reboot? I do not understand how a login prompt for the deleted user can be presented. If it is not, does one simply log in as admin on reboot and create the new user account? If the new account has the same name as the deleted one, are the files in c:\users\<username> over-written? Another question is this: when the user account is deleted, (I believe) that the registry hive for the account is deleted. Doesn't this mean that user-specific registry keys (software licenses, etc) are lost?

Please help me figure this out ASAP! I have work that must get done tomorrow, but do not want to take any actions which are irreversible until I understand the consequences.

Hello Groston,

That's the method recommend by Microsoft to fix the temp profile error as outlined in the tutorial. The deleted user profile should be recreated at startup though.

If you are uncomfortable with that, you can also use this instead.

The User Profile Service failed the logon. User profile cannot be loaded. - Vista Forums

Hope this helps,
Shawn

Brink - I sent you a private message.

Backup anything that you do not want to lose to be safe. Afterwards, you could try a repair install.

Next time you want to be über careful, I suggest you take an image rather than a restore point. Advantages:

1. The image restores the user files which the restore point does not. That may not sound like a big deal but in many manipulations the user data can get damaged - unless you have stored it in a seperate data partition.
2. Restoring an image works all the time whilst restoring from a restore point can be problematic - especially if you have NIS installed.
3. You avoid problems like the one you have right now.

All,

As odd as it may seem, it appears that the ntuser.dat file is missing from c:\users\<my account>. However, there are log files available. Is it possible to rebuild ntuser.dat from the log files?

WHS - good point. I clearly did not expect problems from a simple save/restore...

Maybe you can get the ntuser.dat file from the shadow (restore point). With Shadow Explorer you can recover any file. Just navigate to it, right click, Export.

WHS

Great suggestion! I used ShadowExplorer to recover the pile or ntuser.dat (and related files). I copied these into c:\users\<my account>. I then made sure that the entry in ProfileList was correct. I logged out and back in - and shazam - back in business!

Now, if I could only get back the entire day I wasted on this...

Very good. I am glad you are back in business. Consider the lost day as "training". LOL

That's great news Groston. I'm happy to hear that you got this sorted.