Profile not loaded correctly (Cannot access registry)

Question

Every so often, I log on and get the Following Message:

User profile was not loaded correctly. You have been logged on with a temporary profile.
Changes you make to this profile will be lost when you log off. Please see
the event log for details or contact your administrator

This almost always happens when somebody else has been on the computer for a while, and then I log on. This never used to happen, but now it happens pretty often.

My profile is not permanently corrupted, all I have to do is restart my computer, but this annoys me, and I would like to fix it.

I was curios about the reason of this cause, so I looked into the Event Log, and found the root of the problem was the ntuser.dat file in the profile that I was logging on to was locked at logon time. This resulted in the current users registry not being loaded, resulting in failure to load the profile.

I just found a microsoft article that mentions this exact issue: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/960464/

The problem is that I do not want to delete this profile; and this issue does not come up every time that I log on, only when somebody else has been on a long time before me.

What could be locking this file? Is there any way to get a process list without logging on so that I can identify which process has the file locked? Any other suggestions?

Answer 1

Note: I have not tested this yet, but I think this might be the answer:

1. Download Unlocker
2. Install Unlocker
3. Open the Event Viewer
4. Open the Application Logs folder
5. Look for the item that says something like "Windows has detected that your profile is still in use by other applications. It will be unloaded now." It should be a warning level
6. Write down the Event Id, the Source, and "Application Logs"

7. Create a new batch file with the following lines:

   cd C:\Program Files\Unlocker
   Unlocker "%PATHTOMYLOCKEDUSERPROFILE%" /S
   

8. Replace %PATHTOMYLOCKEDUSERPROFILE% with the path to the NTUSER.DAT file in your user folder
9. Open task manager
10. Create a new task
11. In the Events tab, Run your batch file you created
12. In the triggers tab, put the name of the event id you wrote down earlier