Member Avatar for aking

I'm having a continuing problem with Home XP on my laptop. I have to reinstall my personal settings after every reboot or start up. It was fine until about a week ago. My son started using the laptop day and night to chat and blog with people from all over the world. I have Norton anti-virus, spybot 1.3 and adware it always has something on it after his use but I clean it completely. Any ideas how to reinstate this personal settings feature?

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Dani AI

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This looks like a classic user‑profile problem rather than a display/shortcut issue. The quickest way to narrow the cause is to (A) verify whether Windows is loading a temporary/corrupt profile, and (B) rule out a system that deliberately reverts changes at reboot. For : test first so nothing risky is done to your existing data.

Create a fresh administrative account and test persistence (log in, change a desktop setting, reboot). From an existing admin prompt you can create a test account quickly:

net user TempAdmin MyTempPass /add
net localgroup Administrators TempAdmin /add

Log in as that account and see whether settings survive a reboot. If they do, the original profile is corrupt; if they don’t, something is reverting the system on shutdown/startup.

If the problem is a corrupt profile, check the registry key below for duplicate SID entries (one with “.bak”) and correct them. Backup the registry first (File -> Export) and then:

  1. Open Regedit and go to:
    HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList
  2. Look for two similar S‑1‑5‑... keys where one ends in “.bak”.
  3. Rename the non‑.bak key (add “.old”), remove “.bak” from the other so it becomes the active key.
  4. Select the now‑active key and set RefCount = 0 and State = 0 (create DWORDs if missing).
  5. Reboot and test login.

When moving files to a new profile, copy only user data (Desktop, Documents, Favorites, mail PSTs, browser bookmarks and AppData subfolders that you know are needed). Do NOT copy ntuser.dat, ntuser.dat.log or ntuser.ini. Example for Documents:

xcopy "C:\Documents and Settings\OldUser\My Documents" "C:\Documents and Settings\NewUser\My Documents" /E /H /K /Y

Also check Event Viewer around the login time for “Userenv” or “User Profile Service” errors, run chkdsk C: /f, and confirm no disk‑protection/cleanup software is installed that would restore the disk on reboot. was right to point toward profile/permission areas; and ’s recent forum housekeeping is helpful too. Back up before any registry edits, and report specific Event Viewer messages if further help is needed.

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Member Avatar for Zachery

I can't think of anything off the top of my head that would cause this problem. I hope someone else will be able to be of more help.

-note I moved this to the correct forum :)

Member Avatar for aking

Please explain the forums, I'm new wouldn't want to make the same mistake twice.

Member Avatar for Catweazle

The 'stickied' or 'pinned' topics in the Forum Feedback and Community Introductions sections will help explain the forums :)

Member Avatar for techniner

OK First goto microsoft.com and download Microsoft Anti Spyware aka Giant Spyware..

Then run and see if it picks up something the others have not..

Next check the permission issues on the folders them selves.


How often are users loggin on and off... reboots etc etc

Could be the profiles are never being saved to begin with...

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