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Had a power outage. After restarting the computer, now whenever I start Google Chrome, a window pops up "Your preferences can not be read. Some features may be unavailable and changes to preferences won't be saved."

Nothing whatsoever in Chrome Help nor in the Chrome Forums as to how to fix the problem. How can this be resolved?

Additional edit: Uninstalling and reinstalling Chrome does NOT fix the problem.

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4 Answers

up vote 1 down vote

Perhaps your preferences got corrupted.

try this:
http://support.google.com/chrome/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=142059

backup/rename your "Google\Chrome\User Data" directory

this should setup a new profile for you and fix your issue

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Good suggestion, but this did not in fact fix the problem. A new "Default" folder got created, but I still get the popup. – seansand May 3 '12 at 17:38
interesting, this is on windows7 i assume? (judging from your question history).. Have you tried uninstalling/reinstalling? some of the binaries could have also been corrupted – madmaze May 3 '12 at 17:45
This is a Windows XP machine, actually. I was hoping that this could be fixed without a complete uninstall and reinstall, but if I get no other suggestions that's what I'll try. – seansand May 3 '12 at 17:58
Slightly chrome unrelated, but are you seeing any other issues? did XP ask you to run checkdisk on bootup? – madmaze May 3 '12 at 18:00
No unusual problems with anything else other than Chrome. – seansand May 3 '12 at 20:42
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Finally resolved this issue. Uninstalling Chrome and reinstalling it did not fix the problem, as I would expect; I got the same exact window after the reinstall.

I ran chkdsk once, but that didn't fix the problem either. However, the second time I ran chkdsk, the problem did go away. So running chkdsk seems to be the solution, but I have no idea why it took two attempts.

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up vote 2 down vote

I actually found the fix on another site, but can't find my way back to say thanks. So I'll put the fix here. Find your way to the user settings. C:\Documents and Settings\Andy\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome Right-click to properties on "User Data" and go to the security/advanced tab. Click the box "Replace permission entries...." Worked like a charm.

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If the previous solutions didn't work for you as it happened to me, I got it fixed by doing the following in Win 7:

Install Chrome. After setup it will display the usual 'your preferences cannot be read'. Click OK the these errors. After this, Chrome will open a browser window. Go with this window and enter Settings. At the users section, click on 'Delete this user', accept all prompts. Chrome will display its default page when done. Close and reopen Chrome, the problem is now gone!

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