Four users, three ok, fourth freezes and crashes

[Guest]

Hi: I have fairly recently upgraded from Windows 98 to XP Home Edition 2SP.
We have four users. Three are fine, but the fourth (Audrey's) has been
problematic from the word go. Then, she could login without trouble but on
logging out the computer sometimes froze and had to be turned off. On
rebooting sometimes there was an error message about her ntuser.dat.LOG (non
valid link, invalid size). Now, it is hard for her to log on without freezing
on the background before the icons come up. Rebooting passes without error
messages. I would be very grateful for any help with this, please.

 

[Kelly]

Hi Martin,

Depending on how you have set things up, users do/can have size
restrictions. But from the former part of your post, I would suggest:

Logon to another account with admin privilege and run System Restore.
Choose the most recent restore point and SR should restore the user
hives.

Or...

Boot into safe mode and log in as Administrator. Copy ntuser.dat from
%windir%\repair to "Documents and Settings\[your user id]". Now do a system
restore to a point in time prior to when the corruption message began to
appear.

Or...

Relocate NTUserdat

Look in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows
NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList and find the profile you want to change and
then change ProfileImagePath to the ntuser.dat folder that you want to use.
You must manually copy or move the ntuser.dat file there.

Corrupt Hive
http://www.kellys-korner-xp.com/xp_sys32.htm

How to Recover from a Corrupted Registry
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q307545

Other than that and leaning way toward the left:

Run Ad-Aware SE, Spybot and HijackThis:
http://www.majorgeeks.com/downloads31.html

Note: Update the first two programs, once installed, before running.

Good luck and keep us posted.

--

All the Best,
Kelly (MS-MVP)

Troubleshooting Windows XP
http://www.kellys-korner-xp.com