Corruption in Roaming Profiles in Windows Vista

It’s common knowledge that Roaming Profiles are a pretty bad idea, but for practicalities sake and ensuring users back up the data on the Desktop, they are sometimes a necessary evil.

Recently for a specific user, the user received the error on their Vista laptop:

“Your user profile was not loaded correctly! You have been logged on with a temporary profile.

Changes you make to this profile will be lost when you log off. Please see the event log for details or contact your administrator.”

When logging onto a different laptop, the profile loaded correctly.  which meant the issue was on the users laptop, rather than an issue with the profile.

Task #1 is to back up the data on the profile to a separate location.  Particularly any files on the Desktop that you are desperate to preserve.  Next, a quick registry edit removing the reference to the roaming profile for the user; find the entry for the corresponding users SID in the following key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList

Remove the key for this SID only (you should see the path to the profile within the key to give it away).

On deleting the key, just reboot and it should pull down the profile as usual.  In the event of the new profile overwriting the server copy, then simply copy the backup data (you’d be well advised to just copy docs and manually recreate settings such as Exchange profiles).