Where's me profile?

[mlleangelique]

Hello,

Windows XP hates me.

Specifically, every time I try to log onto my laptop it gives me the following message:

"Windows cannot load the locally stored profile. Possible causes of this error include insufficient security rights or a corrupt local profile. If this problem persists, contact your network administrator.

DETAIL - System could not allocate the required space in a registry log."

then

"Windows cannot find the local profile and is logging you on with a temporary profile. Changes you make to this profile will be lost when you log off."

And it loads up, and all my settings are gone - the desktop is more or less empty, my documents are all in the Documents and Settings folder but "My Documents" points to a "TEMP" folder instead and etc.

This follows general beastliness from the computer yesterday - a file I use lots was corrupted and I lost it. I ran chkdsk, which found a few things to fix, and to stop it happening again, I did a full backup of the My Documents folder.

So far I've tried:

A virus check, which came up with nothing (though the virus checker's a bit out of date).
Checking yesterday's backup to see if it had settings as well as files - it didn't.
Telling System Restore to restore Saturday night's settings - it said, "Oh, yes, I'll do that," then restarted the machine and said that actually, it couldn't do that.

Any ideas? If it's not possible to restore the whole thing I'd like at least for My Documents to actually point to My Documents...

Thank you!

 

[superdave1984]

Right click my computer, select manage. Then look at the users and groups to see who is there. What has changed other than the corrupted file that you lost?

 

[mlleangelique]

Oops - sorry, I thought I'd set this to email me when I got replies. As far as I can tell, there's nothing different in the Users section Administrator, K (the profile I use, also set up as admin), Guest, HelpAssistant and Support, with the latter three disabled - not even a temp account. Under groups I have Administrators, Backup Operators, Guests, Network Configuration, Power Users, Remote Desktop Users, Replicator, Users and HelpServicesGroup.

The only thing that's happened that I've not already mentioned (i.e. lost corrupted file, chkdsk, backup) is that it seemed to happen at the same time as I mistyped my password once, although that seems an odd reason for it to mess up a profile. Is that any help?

Thank'ee.

 

[steak1986]

your profile should be under c:\documents and settings\%username%, If it is not there you should just delete your name and recreate a new account which will auto install a new profile that you can then change.

 

[mlleangelique]

All the files are in the Documents and Settings folder, but they can't be accessed easily (i.e. you have to go through the folder structure to get there, as they're not just under My Documents). I suppose a new profile could be set up and everything copied across if there's no other way, but I'd prefer not to if it's possible to restore everything somehow...