Finding underlying cause of Windows 7 account corruption

Question

I have been having trouble with my sister's computer which I built.

The computer is running Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit. The problem is that the accounts become corrupted. The problems first manifest themselves in the form of Windows saying the profile failed to be loaded properly and a temporary profile. Eventually the account will not allow login at all. There will be an error message along the lines of the authentication service failing the login.

I have found information about this problem and how to fix it. The issue is that something has corrupted the account profile and backing up and recreating the accounts fixes the problem.

I have been able to fix things and get logins working again but over a period of around a week it happens again. Bit by bit the accounts corrupt and then it is back to square one. I am frustrated because I don't know what the underlying cause of the problem. At the moment I am just treating the symptoms.

I was hoping someone who may have more experience with dealing with this problem might be able to help me find the root cause.

Some articles suggest that Norton Internet Security (which is installed) is a big culprit of this problem. I could try uninstalling Norton and see if it helps.

The one thing which is different about this computer to any other I have built is that it has a solid state drive. Actually it has both a hard drive and solid state drive. The documents and settings I.e. the Users directory is stored on the hard drive. This was done following an article about moving the user account data onto a separate drive in Windows 7 which I found on the Internet. Moving the User accounts is more of a pain under Windows 7 and this solution involved creating a low level file system link to the folder from the boot drive (Solid State) to the hard drive. The idea is that the computer behaves just as if it is accessing the User's folder from the boot drive but actually the data is stored on the hard drive. This may have nothing to do with the cause of the problem but due to the problem being user account corruption it is a possibility I am unable to rule out.

Answer 1

If the problem is recurring every week or so I would suggest trying a fresh install of windows 7, using something other than norton. I recommend Kaspersky, Avast!, Komodo, etc.

Back semi on topic, I have never heard of anyone using this setup having this sort of problem, I myself use an identical configuration (ex I have 64 bit pro, not ultimate).

EDIT: Can you give more detail about when this problem occurs? Is it every X restarts, or every X days?

And are you sure you correctly setup the directories on the other HDD?

Try reinstalling and following this guide

Answer 2

I haven't personally been able to observe the degradation closely. I have only really had the comments from my Sister and Brother-in-Law to go on.

I don't really know how often they have been going on the computer and logging in to give an accurate guess at the number of restarts.

I just know that from the times I have fixed it, usually within a week or two it is back the way it was.

If there were some kind of physical problem I would expect to see some kind of corruption in other data on the drive but so far I have not observed any such problems. That observation might be skewed by the user profile being modified more heavily than the other data.

I come from a technical background and the frustrating thing is that even having an idea what is happening it is really hard to know what it is causing the problem.

I think it may come down to a reinstall but that is going to be time consuming. I had hoped Windows 7 Service Pack 1 would have come out by now to save having to download so many masses of updates some of which seem to be prone to failing if not done in the right order.