Windows 7 User Submissions

Windows 7 keeps loosing it's profile.. Including the fix

by Dave Head
(Brentford,England)

I installed Windows 7 on my machine yesterday.

I have found that each time I log out and back in, all my personal settings are gone (desktop icons, email account in outlook, etc.).

Account type is administrator. My user profile is local, but status shows temporary.

I have been searching all morning so far and haven't found anything to help so far. Suggestions?

Partial fix for the BUG!

There is a better way to fix the immediate problem. You can do this under your own user ID if you have administrative privileges:

Run REGEDIT
Navigate to "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList"
You should find your profile key, with another named identically except for a ".bak" extension
Delete the "normally named" key
Rename the ".bak" named key to remove the ".bak" extension
Restart your machine
If you do not have administrative privileges, you will need to fist sign on with a user ID that does.

This will allow you to preserve all of the customization you "lost" without having to recreate everything. I have to do this at home all of the time.

The bigger concern is: "Why does this happen at all?"

The only thing I have found (fairly) consistently is that it occurs whenever we use "Switch Users".

Recently, I have noticed that whenever one user is logged on and then computer "sleeps", the next user will "lose" their settings, even if they properly log off the previous user. Executing the fix above always brings the desktop back.

Any ideas, anyone?