Sorry, mixture, I do see your point now. The reason I missed it before was that I was conscious of a possible problem with your method working for vulcanised which you're probably not aware of, but which I failed to consider you'd likely not be aware of.
You see the thread to which vulcanised referred made mention of a user who had deleted all their posts and was questioning whether or not he was still a registered user. Of course, a Google or Bing search would find their posts as cached results, but linking through to the posts themselves would fail since they'd have been deleted since being cached. Hence, you'd not be able to view the posts which would contain the clickable username of the person which links to their profile. So, you see, in such a scenario your method wouldn't work. It's perfectly good otherwise, of course.
Now, it's entirely possible that vulcanised may not even have been seeking the profile of a poster who had removed all their posts, but I suppose I made an assumption that he may have been, as this was the context I took to be carried over from the other thread which he mentioned. Hence, I suggested a method which would work in such a case and regarded methods which wouldn't work as being unsuitable, leading to me questioning your suggestion in this instance.
Hopefully this explains, but I'm not too sure it does. I have a world class hangover and although I know what I'm trying to illustrate, I seem to be having difficulty converting my thoughts into words.
