Please help--How to reattach profile to User directory?

[gonif]

Hi there, I'm in a fix and could use some help. A friend brought me her
PC because it had some Windows XP problems. While troubleshooting it, I
renamed her account's "usrclass.dat" file to see if Windows would
create a fresh one (the file seemed to be corrupt, according to the
event log). Well, what happened is that Windows instead created a whole
new User directory in "Documents and Settings" and attached her user
account to it!

Now I'm stuck -- her account is now without any documents or any of her
custom settings. Her old User directory is still there in Documents and
Settings, so no data has actually been lost (we can access all her
documents, but of course all the custom settings, Yahoo IM profiles,
etc. are unavailable).

How do I reattach her User account to the proper Documents and Settings
directory?

In other words, at first her account was stored in
\Documents and Settings\heather

but now, although that directory still exists, her account is using
\Documents and Settings\heather.PC

"PC" is the computer name. "heather.PC" is the new user directory that
Windows created automatically for some reason. Is there any way to make
Windows point back to the original "heather" directory??
Thank you so much!

Jeff

 

[Rick \Nutcase\ Rogers]

Hi,

Copy the old profile into the new one, use the procedure here:

How to Copy User Data to a New User Profile
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=811151

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP

Associate Expert - WindowsXP Expert Zone

Windows help - www.rickrogers.org

 

[Guest]

How comfortable are you with the registry, cuz this one's complicated...

In regedit, open HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Profile
list. There will be a couple of keys about 30 characters long starting with
S-1-5-21......

Find the one that has ProfileImagePath set to ...\documents and
settings\heather.pc, and remove the .pc This will point the user login back
to the original profile.

Reboot.

All this will do no good if the profile is still broken though, so make sure
to put usrclass.dat back first!

 

[gonif]

That did it!!! Thank you, Duhvidson, and thanks to everyone who
replied. I used regedit to reassign her user profile to the correct
user directory and rebooted. It came back up with the original "the
registry file could not be loaded" error and then her customized
desktop came up. So next, I logged in as Administrator and replaced
her corrupt usrclass.dat file with one from a new user I had just
created, and all was good in the world. Everything is back, all
preferences and customizations.

Thank you!


Jeff