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A variation of this was posted earlier but I couldn't fully understand the solution so I am asking again. When I logged into windows 7 earlier today it was looking rather different. The desktop theme had disappeared. The icons on start menu were gone. When I started firefox it was as if I was running for the first time. My Deluge (bit torrent client) was empty. Next I found there was nothing in the My Documents folder or My Videos folder.

I fixed the FF issue by manually copying the "old" profile to the new one that was created. I found that in documents library the properties referred to a "C:\Windows\System32\config\systemprofile\Documents" folder rather than the old C:\Users\myself\ folder.

So I know that my windows profile is corrupted and the prior post refers to this page http://www.nextofwindows.com/how-to-change-user-profile-default-location-in-windows-7/ but I don't follow what I need to change in the registry entry to fix this.

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  • Is recreating a new profile the same as creating a new User? By user profile directory do you mean the folder under C:\Users? The C:\users\Myself folder is still there with all contents intact. Yes, I am pretty sure that I have logged into a temporary profile.Thanks Dec 4, 2013 at 17:05
  • Let's say I create a new user called "NewMe", I guess it's pointless to copy the contents of my current user directory C:\users\myself over to C:\users\NewMe, right? Since there is some kind of corruption in the contents of c:\users\myself. Can I selectively copy some of the subfolders? Dec 5, 2013 at 3:24
  • Thanks, that worked fine. only the launch bar wasn't the way it was earlier but other aspects like desktop b/g, program settings and all were recovered. appreciate your help Dec 6, 2013 at 14:43

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The fix is to recreate a new user profile. I have seen dozens upon dozens of questions on how to solve problems, because the user performed a registry hack, dealing with user profiles. If the user profile directory (under C:\Users\Yourusername) does not exist, verify it does, because it sounds like you might have actually logged into a temporary profile which Windows uses when it detects a problem with the profile.

And you can copy the files from C:\Users\OldProfile to C:\Users\NewProfile :

Your personal files are not what caused the corruption. Just take ownership of the old user profile, transfer the data to the new user profile, and you have solved your problem.

[From Ramhound's comments.]

What I did was create a new administrator account, log into it and rename my profile directory. (Needed to use Unlocker to successfully rename the folder.) Then created a new account with the same name, logged in as that user, and then as that user, copied over everything except ntuser.* and AppData from the old profile to the new one. Then went through AppData and copied one thing at a time if I thought it was important. My Windows settings have been lost but most everything else is back and working.

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