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I have read countless answers about corrupted user profiles, which all suggest re-creating a new profile and copying user files. I am looking for an alternative solution.
I have a Windows 7 Home Premium, non-networked, and my user profile is corrupted, I think. When logging on, I click on my picture, and the after the welcome screen, I get a blank screen with a mouse pointer. I tried waiting, but no desktop appeared after 24 hours. I created another user profile "Sanjay2" and copied my C:\Users\Sanjay files into C:\Users\Sanjay2. The new profile loads fine.
I need to revive my old profile. I have looked in
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList\S...
and I have tried resetting RefCount back to 0 (it was 1), State back to 0, Flags is 0 too. Not sure what else can be done.
The reason I don't want to start form a new profile is that I have a huge number of custom settings in the old profile -- which are all lost in the new profile. These appear to be app-specific settings that are stored in user.dat. This includes favourites, MRUs, carefully positioned column setups in tables, Explorer window positions, game graphics settings, autobackup configurations, custom settings for 4 IDEs, many photoshop plugin settings etc etc.
Ideally I want to find the offending portions in the "corrupted" profile and remove them. Is there any way to find out what is causing it? My suspicion is that it might be a mapped drive or something? (I have a USB wifi dongle which is does not connect to internet untile some time after logon). Could that be it? If so can I trace such things?
I suppose one final last-ditch option is to export the HKUsers into the new profile, one branch at a time, from the old profile... And of course run the risk of the problem occurring again. Anyone had any experience of this, or offer any further tips?
Sanjay Manohar
Posted 2014-08-11T19:11:07.510
Reputation: 396
Have you tried a system restore to an earlier point before things went wrong? system restore will restore user profiles. – DavidPostill – 2014-08-11T19:19:10.147
Thank you, I have tried that and it still went to the blank screen! – Sanjay Manohar – 2014-08-11T19:39:03.917
When you get the blank (black?) screen, does Ctrl+Alt+Del work? – and31415 – 2014-08-11T19:43:01.170
Do you have any backup system in place? You could try restoring an older copy of your ntuser.dat. (If you don't have backups, it is time to start!) – Zoredache – 2014-08-11T19:57:35.260
@and31415 Ctrl+Alt+Del does nothing. Have to power off by holding the power button for 5 seconds! – Sanjay Manohar – 2014-08-11T20:14:29.720
@Zoredache I use an archiving system and have backups of all my files, but not of
ntuser.datunfortunately.... I think you are right that I should also back upntuser.dat, although I think it's more tricky because I don't think it's possible to copy that file while logged in to the same profile. – Sanjay Manohar – 2014-08-11T20:16:46.653Windows Backup has in-built "image" backups that will backup the entire system image, aim to use that going forward. :) – Ƭᴇcʜιᴇ007 – 2014-08-11T20:27:59.830