Corrupted user profile.. how to get back to old name?

[yuppicide]

Running XP Pro at work. Login through a domain on Win2003SBS. I login with
my name ssetnicky and password. We only use the server to store data really,
it pushes out antivirus to all the machines, and we can access our
accounting software's database which resides on the server. Each one of us
has our own login and we're a member of the administrators group.

My local computer's profile got corrupted around March 24th. When I logged
on it looked as if I was viewing XP for the first time.. the little take a
tour icon popped up, none of my quicklaunch icons were there, etc. I spent
about 3 hours getting everything back to (almost) how I had it, installing
some programs I couldn't find, copying stuff from my corrupted profile's
desktop to the new one, re-setting up email, etc. After all that I was able
to delete my old profile's directory to save some space.

So, the old directory was C:\Documents and Settings\ssetnicky

The new one it's using for my profile is C:\Documents and Settings\TEMP

Everything I've done so far runs fine, but Friday April 9th is the first
time I found something that will not work. It's a website that uses .NET. I
can login, but when I try to do a ny work it says access denied. It should
be storing stuff in C:\Documents and Settings\TEMP\Local Settings\Apps\2.0\
but nothing is in there.

We verified the software will indeed work on my computer, as I logged in
with a different username so I logged in as apurohit and it created the
profile C:\Documents and Settings\apurohit since she had never logged into
my computer before.. we went to the website and all worked fine. So, it must
have something to do with that TEMP folder my profile is stored under.

Is there a way to get me out of temp and back into my name?

 

[Pegasus [MVP]]

Running XP Pro at work. Login through a domain on Win2003SBS. I login with
my name ssetnicky and password. We only use the server to store data
really, it pushes out antivirus to all the machines, and we can access our
accounting software's database which resides on the server. Each one of us
has our own login and we're a member of the administrators group.

My local computer's profile got corrupted around March 24th. When I logged
on it looked as if I was viewing XP for the first time.. the little take a
tour icon popped up, none of my quicklaunch icons were there, etc. I spent
about 3 hours getting everything back to (almost) how I had it, installing
some programs I couldn't find, copying stuff from my corrupted profile's
desktop to the new one, re-setting up email, etc. After all that I was
able to delete my old profile's directory to save some space.

So, the old directory was C:\Documents and Settings\ssetnicky

The new one it's using for my profile is C:\Documents and Settings\TEMP

Everything I've done so far runs fine, but Friday April 9th is the first
time I found something that will not work. It's a website that uses .NET.
I can login, but when I try to do a ny work it says access denied. It
should be storing stuff in C:\Documents and Settings\TEMP\Local
Settings\Apps\2.0\ but nothing is in there.

We verified the software will indeed work on my computer, as I logged in
with a different username so I logged in as apurohit and it created the
profile C:\Documents and Settings\apurohit since she had never logged into
my computer before.. we went to the website and all worked fine. So, it
must have something to do with that TEMP folder my profile is stored
under.

Is there a way to get me out of temp and back into my name?

When you have a corrupted profile then you should follow this course of
action:
1. Reboot the machine.
2. Log on as administrator.
3. Rename the corrupted profile folder to xxx.bad.
4. Log on as the normal user.
5. Copy all files from the bad profile to the new profile, except for the
registry hives.
6. Manually restore your settings.
The principle of the process is described here, even though it refers to
Windows 7:
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/Fix-a-corrupted-user-profile.

Deleting a corrupted profile prematurely is not recommended - you might lose
irreplaceable data. Much better to install a larger disk so that things are
not so tight. Disk are cheap!

The location of profile folders is set here: HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows
NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList. You need to change every occurence of the
"temp" path to the new path. Best to create a Restore Point before
commencing. You must also check the permission settings of the profile
folder.

 

[yuppicide]

Thanks for all the information. Yeah, a larger hard drive would be nice, but
it's not really worth it with such old computers. We're on 1.9Ghz single
core systems, the memory is maxed out at 1GB. The hard drives are 20GB. I've
been trying for a long time to get them to upgrade, but no luck. We only
have 5 or 6 machines, so not like it would be that much cash.

I'd rather see the company invest in new machines than just a hard drive..
at least dual core, hopefully at least 2GB memory, and NOT Celeron
processor. They bought our operations manager a new computer.. she wonders
why it's not that fast.. they got her a Celeron with only 1GB, so even
though the computer was new it was pretty much the same crap as the old one.