Windows 7 profile not loading?

Qhue

Qhue

Tranny Chaser
7,479
4,423
I'm normally pretty competent when it comes to the family tech support etc. calls but this one has me stumped. Buddy has a problem where he logs into his win7 machine like normal only his actual profile doesnt load and he ends up with some generic desktop (likely a temporary profile is my thinking). Apparently this has happened a few times and his solution was always to roll back to an earlier restore point.

Flash forward to today when he tries to roll back his antivirus (AVG) won't let him. He deactivates AVG and now his restore points all vanish.

The only time I've heard of the original issue was in enterprise type situations where a user's home directory was unavailable, but never on a purely local machine. I've never encountered something that prevented or nuked restore points. Some GoogleFu located some similar-ish problems but all the posed solutions involved extensive registry editing which I've always made a point of avoiding.

I recommended he go into safe mode and see if he can locate any restore points, but that he would be best served by just nuking his system partition and reinstalling Windows. Anyone encounter anything similar to this? I suspect AVG may be at the root of the problem.
 
Zodiac

Zodiac

Lord Nagafen Raider
1,200
14
He can make a new user, log into that user and copy his shit (my docs, favorites, desktop, etc) from his old profile to the new user. User/profiles do get jacked up sometimes in Win 7 and I've always found it simpler to just recreate the profile rather than jacking with it for hours.
 
ronne

ronne

Nǐ hǎo, yǒu jīn zi ma?
7,930
7,095
AVG pretty likely to have cocked things up. Yes restore points can and will get deleted, it's not some super protected thing (a lot of system cleaner type things will do it). Before you scrap the whole thing check for permissions issues on the user folder and run the obvious rootkit scans (tdsskiller/fixtdss). If permissions aren't the issue his profile is probably just fucked and you have to make a new one. You can copy all your data etc from the old to the new, and the instructions below will copy all his profile settings and other shit as well so it'll be like he never had to switch.

I'd really recommend staying far as fuck away from AVG, as it's about a half a step from just being adware itself and it honestly causes more problems than it fixes these days.Theseutilities will scrub the system of whatever install he had. Just use MSE for antivirus, or pay for something (Norton) if you really want to. Once/if you get the user profile fixed have him try and create a new manual restore point to see if there's any other issues with that, but with AVG gone it should be fine.

 
Frenzied Wombat

Frenzied Wombat

Potato del Grande
14,730
31,802
Pretty much what Zodiac said, but first of all go to the properties of c:\users\username and check the security tab and make sure his account has full control over the folder. If he already does simply create a new profile and copy over as much as you can, almost everything will be preserved.
 
Friday

Friday

Lord Nagafen Raider
870
104
Run regedit

hkey_local_machine\software\microsoft\windows nt\currentversion\profilelist

Look for his S-1-5xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (lots of letters and numbers here) - his profile should be the one with his login name on the right hand side

If it has a .bak, delete the .bak extension

Set RefCount to 0
Set State to 0

Reboot.

Login.
 
Gnomedolf

Gnomedolf

<Silver Donator>
15,796
99,179
Friday_sl said:
Run regedit

hkey_local_machine\software\microsoft\windows nt\currentversion\profilelist

Look for his S-1-5xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (lots of letters and numbers here) - his profile should be the one with his login name on the right hand side

If it has a .bak, delete the .bak extension

Set RefCount to 0
Set State to 0

Reboot.

Login.
Click to expand...
This works. I've had to do it several times at work for various people.
 
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