User profile failed to load

[Keith Snyder]

First time I've seen this. Windows starts, I try to log in on my id, and
get a message to the effect that Windows was unable to load my user profile!

Then, Windows created a bare skeleton profile for me. My Documents
didn't have my documents, the desktop was something from Dell, and many
other mysteries.

On a hunch, I shut down and restarted, and lo and behold, my profile was
properly loaded, and I was back to a recognizable system.

This is XP SP3.

Looking around I found a new file TEMP buried deep in Documents and
Settings etc. that had a skeleton My Documents among other things.-

What on earth happened? Any ideas?

 

[R. McCarty]

This isn't an uncommon occurrence. I frequently see machines where the
primary profile won't load. Sometimes just a reboot resolves it. Other times
you have to boot Safe Mode ( Last Known Working Configuration ) to
get the profile to load correctly. It's usually a sign of some corruption
that
you should take as a warning to backup your system.

 

[Keith Snyder]

I took your advice and backed up my entire system. I exported the
Registry so that is included as well.

Some sort of corruption strikes me as a good guess. I use Outlook
Express for a Usenet reader only (not email) and a few weeks ago it
failed to even start. I followed suggested cures for the dbx files, but
that didn't help, and the instructions I had indicated a corrupted
Registry. I didn't follow through on that because I have Mozilla
Thunderbird that I can use for Usenet. Outlook Express remains
completely broken.

I'm not sure. My hard drive might be getting flaky, or Registry
problems, or something else.

Any suggestions on localizing the corruption?

 

[R. McCarty]

I'd probably do a cursory ( or read-only ) Chkdsk on your Windows
volume. It will report whether a more comprehensive Chkdsk /F or /R
should be performed. On the Registry you might use NTRegOpt which
basically writes out the Registry to a flat file and then rebuilds it to
remove
"White Space".
http://www.larshederer.homepage.t-online.de/erunt/
*It probably won't correct any data corruption.

On Outlook Express it seems like you've taken proper steps to
verify the integrity of the .dbx stores. You might get better assistance
in the OE newsgroups. One thing I've had moderate success with is
just removing the account and re-creating.

 

[flux blocker]

A similar thing happened to one of our users. Their profile did not load and
a TEMP dir was created under documents and settings. We rebooted, and it
loaded her original profile, but then the TEMP folder was gone, along with
some files she'd created in the TEMP profile. You said you found a temp dir
buried under documents and settings; where did you find it?

Thanks in advance,
flux