Wednesday, July 2, 2014

Fix Temporary User Profile Account or Missing Desktop Content

If you log in and get the following:





  1. Run REGEDIT
  2. Navigate to "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList"
  3. You should find your profile key, with another named identically except for a ".bak" extension
  4. Delete the "normally named" key
  5. Rename the ".bak" named key to remove the ".bak" extension
  6. Restart your machine

If you do not have administrative privileges, you will need to first sign on with a user ID that does.
This will allow you to preserve all of the customization you "lost" without having to recreate everything. I have to do this at home all of the time.

Full credit goes to Michael Paxton for his post that can be found here.