Graham Douglas
Member
Hi all,
in my searching for solutions, this forum came up with lots of good advice, so I've joined in the hope that you can help me with something that's proving a bit intractable.
Apologies for the length of this post, but I'd like to give as much info as possible.
I've been a bit nervous about upgrading a working system, which is why I waited about 4 years before biting the bullet. The install disc I'm using comes from an old MSDN subscription I had several years ago, and is (I think) the first official release of Vista.
I did a trial install on a clean partition to ensure that my system could actually run Vista, and that seemed to work fine, so I went ahead with the upgrade of my XP system.
All seemed to go fine until I tried logging on to one of the (three) user accounts and got the dreaded 'user profile failed' message. This happened to all of the accounts.
Following the advice I found in here, I enabled the Administrator account, and implemented the registry fix (the '.bak' entries). After a bit of firtling, I managed to be able to consistently log on.
So, first important point: I have a system that sort of works.
However: now, when I look at the user profile folder in explorer, most of them are duplicated - i.e. I have two 'Documents' folders, two 'Download' folders and so on. Investigation shows that one of the pair points to the Users\<user> folder and the other (the 'real' one - the one with the special icon) points to system32\config\userprofile. Another however: if I boot up in safe mode, I only get one set of folders, and these are the 'user' folders, not the system32 ones. This leads me to suspect that a driver is affecting the User folders, such that the login process can't access them correctly. I sometimes, but not always, get the message telling me that it's using a temporary profile.
Creating a brand new 'scratch' user also suffers from the login failed problem - but there's no registry entry to muck about with (further confirming my suspicion that this has something to do with access to files). Booting in safe mode allowed me to log on to that account.
Another possible data point to this theory: I tried (as Administrator) to copy one of the user profile folders to a safe place. It failed to copy one file (it wouldn't say which one - any bets on ntuser.dat?) with the claim that the file was in use by another program.
Startup repair doesn't see any problems.
Booting up in safe mode with networking appears to send the logon to sleep (it sits there for a good 10 minutes saying 'welcome', no apparent disc activity).
Fortunately, Windows Update appears to be working, so I'm in the process of getting every update I can, in the hope that something will trip (but I'm not holding my breath).
So that's about where I am. I should add the other two important points here:
second point: this started immediately after the upgrade, so I do not have a system restore point prior to the problem, so doing a system restore is not an option.
third point: I will try anything rather than a clean install - I simply have too much invested in the current system for that to be feasible (for example, I need to deactivate certain programs, such as Photoshop, in order to be able to install them again, and I'm not sure that that's currently possible). Basically, I would need to be able to recover some unknown subset of all registry entries from the original system.
I'm convinced that the problem is down to one rogue item (probably a driver) and that, if I can locate and kill it, then all should be OK again. The problem is locating which one it is.
Again, apologies for the length of this post (especially from a first-timer), and here's hoping someone can help me identify the source of the problem.
in my searching for solutions, this forum came up with lots of good advice, so I've joined in the hope that you can help me with something that's proving a bit intractable.
Apologies for the length of this post, but I'd like to give as much info as possible.
I've been a bit nervous about upgrading a working system, which is why I waited about 4 years before biting the bullet. The install disc I'm using comes from an old MSDN subscription I had several years ago, and is (I think) the first official release of Vista.
I did a trial install on a clean partition to ensure that my system could actually run Vista, and that seemed to work fine, so I went ahead with the upgrade of my XP system.
All seemed to go fine until I tried logging on to one of the (three) user accounts and got the dreaded 'user profile failed' message. This happened to all of the accounts.
Following the advice I found in here, I enabled the Administrator account, and implemented the registry fix (the '.bak' entries). After a bit of firtling, I managed to be able to consistently log on.
So, first important point: I have a system that sort of works.
However: now, when I look at the user profile folder in explorer, most of them are duplicated - i.e. I have two 'Documents' folders, two 'Download' folders and so on. Investigation shows that one of the pair points to the Users\<user> folder and the other (the 'real' one - the one with the special icon) points to system32\config\userprofile. Another however: if I boot up in safe mode, I only get one set of folders, and these are the 'user' folders, not the system32 ones. This leads me to suspect that a driver is affecting the User folders, such that the login process can't access them correctly. I sometimes, but not always, get the message telling me that it's using a temporary profile.
Creating a brand new 'scratch' user also suffers from the login failed problem - but there's no registry entry to muck about with (further confirming my suspicion that this has something to do with access to files). Booting in safe mode allowed me to log on to that account.
Another possible data point to this theory: I tried (as Administrator) to copy one of the user profile folders to a safe place. It failed to copy one file (it wouldn't say which one - any bets on ntuser.dat?) with the claim that the file was in use by another program.
Startup repair doesn't see any problems.
Booting up in safe mode with networking appears to send the logon to sleep (it sits there for a good 10 minutes saying 'welcome', no apparent disc activity).
Fortunately, Windows Update appears to be working, so I'm in the process of getting every update I can, in the hope that something will trip (but I'm not holding my breath).
So that's about where I am. I should add the other two important points here:
second point: this started immediately after the upgrade, so I do not have a system restore point prior to the problem, so doing a system restore is not an option.
third point: I will try anything rather than a clean install - I simply have too much invested in the current system for that to be feasible (for example, I need to deactivate certain programs, such as Photoshop, in order to be able to install them again, and I'm not sure that that's currently possible). Basically, I would need to be able to recover some unknown subset of all registry entries from the original system.
I'm convinced that the problem is down to one rogue item (probably a driver) and that, if I can locate and kill it, then all should be OK again. The problem is locating which one it is.
Again, apologies for the length of this post (especially from a first-timer), and here's hoping someone can help me identify the source of the problem.
Looks Like a Mystery to me
For when Windows 8 (If that is what it is going to be called) Comes out Windows XP Will be Incompatible