Windows 7 - User Profile Folder - Change User Account Folder Name

This worked brilliantly, the only thing is, i changed my username a few weeks back instead of doing it after renaming the "User Profile Folder". I have not came across any problems.

Hello Brink,
I changed successfully changed the oldusername. However in the C:/Users folder appears the oldusername with the following AppData and NtUser.Dat files. Also in the registry are about 20 instances of the oldusername. The user name does not appear in the Windows NT Current Version ProfileList of the registry. Further the oldusername apperars in the "Profiles stored on this computer" of "System Properties" box "Advanced" tab "User Profile" settings as newusername-HP\oldusername. How can I remove the oldusername from the computer? What happens if I delete the olderusername folder from C:/Users folder? Will it reappear again? I am wondering if these old vestiges of the oldusername will take up memory and cause future problems. Thank you for guidance with this problem.
freddi6111

Hello Freddi, and welcome to Seven Forums.

Due to the reasons in the blue NOTE box at the top of the tutorial, the only true way to remove the old name of the user account is to create a new administrator account, then delete the old user account while logged in the new one.

Be sure to backup anything that you do not want to lose from the old account first though. For example, shortcuts, Start Menu shortcuts, files inside the user folders, etc....

Hope this helps,
Shawn

Hi Shawn,

Thank you for answering my questions. I followed the tutorial instructions. The residual oldusername mess is probably from an earlier window support failed username change. Your procedure worked better. But now I have the oldusername mess. What can I do to remove the oldusername information in the registry and the abbreviated oldusername folder in the c:/Users folder? If I start from scratch and use another newusername, I will still have the original oldusername material. Can you help me with the manually removal of the oldusername material? Can I make registry changes that would eliminate the oldusername? Will a safe mode removal of the oldusername folder work. Any help is appreciated to overcome this problem. Thank you for your time and your response to my original request.

Freddi,

Once you have deleted the old user account from within the Control Panel, you should be able to delete it's C:\User\(user-name) folder.

As for the registry entries, I can't recommend to just delete all references found in the registry with that name since I can't see what they are for. It's just to dangerous and risky to leave you with having to reinstall Windows 7.

If you like however, you could use steps 11-12 in the tutorial to look for a long number S-1-5-.... key at the three registry locations below that may have the old deleted user account name as the data value for ProfileImagePath. If so, delete the long number S-1-5-.... key for the old deleted user account. Be sure to create a restore point first. This way if you make a mistake, you can do a system restore at boot to select the restore point and undo the mistake.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList

and

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList

and

HKEY_USERS

I recently purchased a pc running Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit and set about changing the name of the guy who set it all up to mine. I succeeded in getting myself logged on as administrator and changed every instance of his name that I could find simply by clicking on 'rename'. Some of those instances weren't allowed and I now have my name showing up at start up with no other users visible, but Windows Explorer C:\users shows only the old user name and mine doesn't appear. This folder shows a padlock symbol and is clearly locked so I don't have any sort of access to it. I tried to work through the tutorial but couldn't log on as the other guy as he doesn't appear on the opening screen and I can't change anything else.

Hello Shealtiel, and welcome to Seven Forums.

If you just go and rename everything like that, you're going to run into issues that may leave you not being able to log into the user account as you have just found out the hard way.

Are you able to boot into Safe Mode, enable the built-in Administrator, log in to the built-in Administrator, undo whatever you did, then follow the proper steps in the tutorial to rename a user account?

Hi Brink

You wrote, "Are you able to boot into Safe Mode, enable the built-in Administrator, log in to the built-in Administrator, undo whatever you did, then follow the proper steps in the tutorial to rename a user account?"

The short answer is no, because I am new to Windows 7 and am familiar with nothing as it is so different from XP.

However, thanks to you and your excellent tutorial and explanatory links I have been able to do most of those things. I was able to get into Safe Mode and to log-in to the built-in Administrator, but totally unable to undo all that I had done that you said I shouldn't have. So I decided to follow as best I could, "the proper steps" to rename a user account. However each time bar one that it came to renaming the old account I found my own name there already from what I'd done previously, so I went through motions of doing the change without actually doing it and everything seemed to work OK. The one place I just knew I would still find the old name was in the Registry so I did that "properly". After that everything went swimmingly right to the point where you said the background would be black and it was. However before I had time to do any more while I watched it reverted to my old background and everything was back to normal. So it all fitted where it touched and everything is OK as far as the name change goes. Thanks for all your help. All I have to do now is to disable that built-in bloke.

I do have another unrelated problem but I'll bring that up in the proper place.

So tremendous thanks and God bless!

Alan

You're most welcome Alan. I'm happy to hear that you got it all untwisted and sorted.

I was following your tutorial & all was going fine until step 7. It wouldn't let me rename the folder so I went into safe mode to try again. I was able to do it fine, but then I didn't go directly into regedit to do step 9 because I couldn't see the next step in safe mode. I restarted in normal mode & it said something about not starting up the user correctly. I did the rest of the steps, but when I logged back on it looked like a new user screen. All my pictures, documents, email, was gone. I had created a system restore point before I began this, so I figured I would just start over again. After I did the system restore though, I still don't have my stuff back. My icons are there & the screen is blue. My pictures, docs, & email are still gone. Any idea why the restore didn't work? HELP!