Cannot load user profile after Windows Update

[BXPS]

Last night I applied the latest security patches to my laptop. When I
rebooted my computer I got the message that my User Profile could not be
loaded and Windows loaded the default profile. The message said that the
process could not access the file because it was being used by another
process. I shut down the computer and tried again and everything worked just
fine. In looking through the posts here today I see that this can happen if
the user profile file becomes corrupted but that obviously must not have been
my case, I guess. Does anyone have any idea why this might have happened?
It just kind of freaked me out since there's been so much talk in the news
lately about the Conficker Worm.

By the way, I also upgraded to XP SP3 (using a CD, not a download) just
prior to applying the security updates..

 

[BXPS]

One other thing I should mention, I believe I ran a Glary Utilities scan of
the registry at some point before that reboot that brought up the User
Profile error message. Could I have deleted something from the registry that
got put back rightwhen I actually turned the computer back off then on again?

 

[Anteaus]

Problems of this kind are more often due to disk errors, or sometimes the
permissions on the profile folder.

A good starting-point is a chkdsk. A readout of the smart data from the HD
may also be useful to see if there is evidence of hardware problems.