XP Profile Corrupted

[Tenken]

Yesterday i shutdown my computer and i started it up today and i get the message.
"Windows cannot load your profile because it may be corrupted. You may be logged in using a temporary User Profile." and all my files seem to be gone and the computer wont save anything after restarts is there anyway to fix this?

 

[office politics]

you can try to save as much data as you can. Your profile is located at c:\documents and settings\*username*\

check event viewer for errors

boot to recovery console and run chkdsk

 

[brady]

You can rename the user.name.bak folder in your documents and settings folder. You will then have a new profile created upon login. You can then copy over your "My Documents, Desktop and Local Settings" from the (renamed) user.name.bak folder to your newly created profile directory.

 

[Tenken]

Its weird because all my files were there the first time i noticed the problem but when i restarted again they are all gone. and i created a new profile but it seems to not be saving anything to that one either after restarts.

 

[brady]

Do you have file extensions hidden? How does your old profile read?
ex: user.name.bak?

Can you "Manage" the machine and tell me what the error messages say in the event viewer?

Check in the "application" logs... the "source" will be userenv

 

[Tenken]

Sorry i dont know exactly what you mean by user.name.bak? and "Manage" the machine. how do i check the application logs?

Would reformating fix this problem as a last result?

 

[brady]

Re: Reformatting :
As a LAST result, yes. However unnecessary at this point.

To view the Event Logs, you need to right click your My Computer Icon.
You will see an option for "Manage".
Select Manage.

Once the management console opens up, you will see the "Event View". Open that up and select the Application log.

By default it is arranged by date. Look for the source column. You should see the "userenv" under the source column. You can double click the entry to open it up. Please copy paste the contents of that log into this thread so I can take a look.

As for the User.Name.bak... Lets not worry about that quite yet.
Lets focus on why this is happening.

 

[Tenken]

dows saved user JESSE-V1QIIGQY2\Jesse registry while an application or service was still using the registry during log off. The memory used by the user's registry has not been freed. The registry will be unloaded when it is no longer in use.

There are alot of Userenv's but is this it?

 

[Tenken]

Windows was unable to load the registry. This is often caused by insufficient memory or insufficient security rights.

DETAIL - The configuration registry database is corrupt. for C:\Documents and Settings\Jesse\ntuser.dat

Also showed one of these...

 

[brady]

Yikes... Thats not good. I would recommend a reg cleaner however, I have been fixing problems due to these reg cleaners all week...

When did this start happenening?
Anything new added to the machine?
Any new programs/patches?

Anything?