'User profile was not loaded correctly'

[Senior Paper Monitor]

This is my month for computer problems it appears !

My Vista equipped Sony Vaio had it first birthday last Wednesday, marked by Norton 360 V1 licence expiring (and the warranty of course).

Upgraded (download) to Norton 360 V2 Premium on renewal Thursday - had problems getting it to load V2 Premium rather than V2 Standard so contacted the helpdesk using chat facility.

Endd up letting them establish a remote session to provide correct download - this involved them rebooting the machine after installation and it came back to life with 'changed desktop', which I drew to their attention but V2 Premium was there. HOWEVER !! On further and brief investigation various programmes and files missing.

Rebooted again and noticed warning (attention box from toolbar) which read "Your User Profuile loaded incorrectly. You have been logged on with a temporary profile. Any changes you make to this profile will not be saved and will be lost when you sign out." This continues to happen.

Obviously the lost files and programmes are there somewhere but I can't find them.

The only profiles shown are my original (administrator), which it won't let me into and the standard guest (disabled).

Contacting Symantec has resulted in the expected brush off - nothing to do with us ! Its a Windows problem ! Contact Mr Gates !

Any advice/suggestions ?

[ak2006]

hi, i literally just got this issue on my brothers dell XPS and i have had it on my notebook xps aswell.

as soon as i realized what was wrong i logged out and logged back in again. this seems to have fixed the problem. i dont know what caused it but am working on it....

try to login if it does the same, log back out(do not shutdown) and log back in again that should fix it. it maybe an update or something that causes this issue. hope this helps somehow..

alan

[Jofm5]

SPM:

I have never seen this problem myself but did a little reading and the general concensus is that someone has deleted/removed parts of the profile which is giving vista problems.

One fix I found for this was here: http://www.answersthatwork.com/Download_Area/ATW_Library/Windows_Vista/Vista__3-Vista_Problem_Error_Your_user_profile_was_not_loaded_correct ly.pdf

However I would backup your machine beforehand or at least the user directory affected (Typically c:\users\xxxx where xxxx is the username) as it looks like it may remove your corrupted profile and allow vista to rebuild from the default profile.

Cheers

Jof

[bnt]

I had this a couple of times on a work computer. As noted, logging out and back in is usually enough, because everything you have is still in your profile* on disk, it's just that that the profile wasn't "engaged". It's like XP missed a gear change as you put the foot down.

My hypothesis is that it has to do with the services that are still loading behind the scenes as the logon screen appears. Microsoft cheats a little in this regard: when that screen appears, the computer isn't fully "up", but they judge that enough of it is going for you to log in. However, when that happens, it appears that they got that wrong, and something that's supposed to be up isn't - such as a security or virus checker.

* "Profile" has a specific meaning in the Windows world: everything under C:\Documents and Settings\<username> (XP) or C:\Users\<username> (Vista & 7). UNIX systems such as Linux or Mac OS X have the "home directory" equivalent (/home/<username>). On any multi-user system, everything that belongs to a user should be kept under the user's profile only, not scattered across the disk as used to happen in e.g. Windows 95. It's not just for security, it also makes backups more manageable, and feeds in to the argument I have with people about "backing up the computer" vs. "backing up the data".