Disappearing User Profile? Don't Panic.

[Fenux]

When I sat down at my computer today, it had rebooted on it's own during the night. When I logged in, Windows 7 notified me it had recovered from a crash. Then I noticed I was staring at a default profile. All of my settings and data were missing.

Upon further investigation, a new profile had been created in C:\Users\TEMP. At first, I thought maybe something had been corrupted in the profile and it was creating a new one. I've seen it happen as far back as Windows 2000. It's a pain, but that type of error is possible to recover data from by forcing it to recreate the profile in the right place. The first step of which, is logging off.

After logging into the other account on the computer, the TEMP profile had completely disappeared. When I logged back into my account, my settings and data had returned, though the system was running a bit sluggish.

A reboot later, everything was back to normal. I suspect this is a debugging feature, but I thought I would share my experience in case anyone else out there experiences a similar problem.

 

[RonS WIN TEAM]

Thanks for sharing

Thanks for sharing this. It's good to know these little things.

Cheers,

 

[Brink]

Hello Fenux,

Yes, thank you for sharing this. If it happens again and you are not able to do what you did before, then this may be able to help fix it.

User Profile Error - Logged on with a Temporary Profile - Vista Forums

Hope this helps,
Shawn