Corrupted User Profile in Windows 7

April 11th, 2014 by Rossy Guide

What is this, how does it show:

Your user profile is a collection of settings that make the computer look and work the way you want it to. It contains your settings for desktop backgrounds, screen savers, pointer preferences, sound settings, and other features. User profiles ensure that your personal preferences are used whenever you log on to Windows. If you tried to log on to Windows and received an error message telling you that your user profile might be corrupted, you can try to repair it. You will need to create a new profile, and then copy the files from the existing profile to the new one.

In Windows 7, it is very common that we come across corrupt user profiles. There are many solutions and tricks for us to fix it. Here we offer 2 ways to fix corrupt user profile. We will see the error message “The user profile cannot be loaded” or “The User Profile Service failed the logon” if we type the password and press Enter.

Fix the corrupt profile:

One of the reasons that cause corrupt profile is that antivirus software is scanning your PC while you try to log on. But there are still some other reasons. No matter for what reasons, we can fix it. First restart your PC and boot into safe mode. Do this by pressing F8 before you see the Windows loading screen and choosing Safe Mode from the menu that appears. Safe Mode logs you into the built-in Windows administrator account, but you might find that some options don’t work.

Step 1: Click Start and type regedit into the search box and press Enter.

Step 2: Registry Editor will launch and you need to navigate to the following key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList

Step 3: Try to find out which user account it relates to by clicking each S-1-5 folder and double-click the ProfileImagePath entry.

Step 4:  If you have located the folder for the corrupt profile, double-click RefCount and change the Value data to 0 and click Ok.

Step 5: Double-click on State, then make sure the Value data is again 0 and click Ok.

 

How it can be managed:

Create a new user profile:

You are able to create a new user account if you have another account which can access to this PC. Otherwise you need to boot into safe mode as the Trick 1. Then try to do as the following steps. In additional, you have to enable the hidden admin account if neither of them works. Then type cmd in the search box and right-click on Command Prompt. Choose Run as administrator.

Type “net user administrator /active:yes” at the prompt. You can see the response show that: The command completed successfully. Reboot to your PC and see your corrupt account and administrator account. Login the admin account (which has no password) and do as the following:

Step 1: Open Control Panel and click User Accounts and Family Safety

Step 2: Click on User Accounts. Then click Manage another account and type in the password

Step 3: Click create a new account and type the name.

Step 4: Restart your PC.

Copy User Files to the New Profile:

Step 5: It is better for you to log in as Administrator or if you need to transfer files properly. So enable one of them if you haven’t already done so.

Step 6: By clicking Start, Computer and then double-clicking on the hard drive on which Windows is installed, you can navigate to the corrupt user account. Usually c: – and then double-click on the Users folder. Find the folder containing your old user account and double-click it, then double-click My Documents.

Step 7:  It’s best to copy across the contents of sub-folders separately, and this gives you a chance to have a clear out as well. If you do want to copy the entire contents in one go, enable hidden files and folders and then make sure you DON’T copy across the following files:

            Ntuser.dat

            Ntuser.dat.log

            Ntuser.ini

You can click the Tools menu (press Alt if you can’t see it), to make these files visible. Then click the View tab and click Show hidden files, folders and drives. Be sure that any email stored locally may need to be copied separately using instructions specific to your email program. So please don’t delete the corrupt user profile until you are sure you have all the files you need from it.

Step 8: When all the files are copied across to the newly created user profile, restart your computer and log onto the new profile.

If you found this article helpful, please share it with your friends and family. Who knows, maybe they are facing this problem and need help to solve.

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