Any idea why a user profile keeps getting corrupted ?

[keat]

I have a laptop where the user profile is constantly getting corrupted.
I have a second admin profile setup on this laptop, to allow me to easily gain access to the registry and restore the profile from the .bak key.
I'll hand the laptop back to the user.
Three or four sessions later, the user profile has become corrupted again.


Where I'm having to perform the same.


The laptop belongs to a retired gentleman, who uses the laptop infrequently, so I might only see it twice per year, but when he turns up, i know exactly what he's turned up for.


Any thoughts please guys, it's starting to annoy me.

 

[Snick]

keat

Admin, User, or Guest profile?

Malware is a good culprit.
Not shutting down the computer properly, & power outage, basically the same (improper shutdown)
Drive could be starting to fail; bad sectors.
What AV is on the machine.
Has and of the below been run
Malwarebytes
ADWCleaner?
SuperAntiSyware?
Any Online scanners?
Rootkit detectors?
sfc /scannow from Administrative Command Prompt (CMD), for corrupt/missing system files?

 

[Snick]

Hope these may help you!

Corrupt User Profile: Fix for Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8, 8.1, 10

Top 3 Ways to Fix a Corrupted User Profile (Windows 7)

 

[keat]

Restoring the profile isn't really an issue, in fact I talked him through this once.


For the AV, he's using a paid verion of AVG.
I have considered impending hdd failures, but chkdsk doesn't reveal anything.
I also considered that he might just shutting it down incorrectly, or allowing the battery to die whilst it's sleeping, but i've been through this with him, and can confirm that he's perfoming a clean shutdown.


Struggling to compehend how a hardware failure or HDD failure could affect only the user profile if i'm being honest.
There are no BSOD's, no system bootup corruptions etc.
Always the user profile.

 

[Megahertz07]

Is the /Users folder on same drive of Windows?

Open a CMD window as administrator and type:
chkdsk c: /f
It will say your disk is in use and if you want to schedule to next start = Yes
Restart. Pay attention on the results, specially bad blocks, bad clusters, bad sectors etc.

Download, extract and run CrystalDiskInfo. It's a portable, doesn't need to be installed.
It will check the SMART status of the drive.