Windows Tools, Help & Guides

I recently ran into a problem at work with Windows 7. One of the users logged into his new workstation PC and I helped him set-up his profile. After he was happy, I left him to continue working. The next day he phoned me and asked me to have a look, all the settings etc had disappeared. I found this strange and started investigating just to find that he was logged onto the workstation as a TEMP Profile for no apparent reason.

I Google’d again just to find stacks of forums where very similar problems are discussed, but with no clear-cut solutions. After searching for a couple of days between my other work, I stumbled upon something that made some sense.

One of the people posted in a forum, almost as an after-thought, all tucked away where, if you didn’t take the time to read thoroughly, you’d miss it;

“I solved my problem by going into the registry and delete the effected profile’s subfolder under:

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList”

Note: HKLM refers to “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE” in the registry.

Help using the Windows Registry Editor.

So I decided to follow his advice and ran the Registry Editor by clicking on the Start button and typing Regedit to open it.

Looking at the registry editor, I browsed my way to the key as mentioned and found the profile that had the problem.

By looking at the path in ProfileImagePath as circled in red, you can find the correct profile by knowing the Username and comparing the path in C:\Users.

The one having the problem had a .bak extention added at the end where I indicated with red.

I deleted that problematic profile, had the user log in again, and set-up the profile for the second time. This time rebooting the workstation PC and logging in again was a pleasure. The profile worked fine.

Free PC tips by email