Log in as administrator and check user names, domains and their permissions. Manage the system and config the accounts, restart and try again.

"Manage the system and config the accounts" isn't enough information for my level of knowledge, unfortunately. It's as though the computer has detached the association between the username "family" and its settings and folders. their is no username "family.family". There are only two valid accounts: Admin and family. Yet Windows Explorer has added the User Folder for family.family and when you log into family that's where XP is going to load the desktop, My Documents folder, and other user settings.

So, can I change the way XP loads to the level of telling it which folders it should map for the user? And how do I accomplish this?

Thanks,

Jeff

Go into the control panel. And then to User Accounts. See if there is a "family.family" account. If so, change the username to simply "family".

Another thing to try is to go into the control panel. Click Administrative Tools. Then go to Computer Management. In the left frame, click where it says Local Users and Groups and then click on Users. In the right frame, notice all the usernames registered with your system show up. Let us know if there is a family, family.family, etc.

is the user tree still there?

check C;\documents and settings
do you see your documents folder listed in there? It might have been deleted.

See, that's the problem. family.family does not exist in either of those locations. The only place family.family exists, that I can find, is the directory tree.

When you login to family, now it skips the pre-existing settings and folders(which have not been deleted). The first time this happened it loaded generic XP settings and apparently created this family.family entry into the directory tree. It is as though XP has remapped the paths used for loading the family username. And what I hope to learn is how to make it use the original paths.

thanks,

jeff

So you're saying that the "family" user uses the "family.family" home folder? And the "family" home folder does nothing?

It appears to be so, yes.

I have found that if you change the name of a user account in winxp, it keeps the original name of the folder ie. if you originally called your account family.family, and later renamed it to family, windows will not change the name of the family.family folder in Documents and Settings. The only fix that I can think of is to either delete the account and start over, or I think that the tweakUI tool (you can download it from http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/p.../powertoys.asp) allows you to change the default folders, so you would have to log in and change all the folders over in tweakUI (I'm assuming here that your 'family' folder still has all your original settings in it).

The reason for this behavior is that something happened to the "family" profile, and when Windows went to create a new family profile, it tacked on the machine name to the profile directory, hence the "family.family." I'll place good money on that.

If it's not the machine name, I don't know what you did. Instead of the local machine name, the suffix can also be a domain name or "000".