Logged on with a temporary profile 2

 in Windows 7 / Windows Vista  tagged Windows 7 / Windows Vista by

This is a pain. For some reason, unkown even to Microsoft aparently, I reboot my system only to login to a temporary profile in Windows Vista or Windows 7.   As of this writing, I am using the release candidate of Windows 7, but since I’ve seen this on Vista and even on Windows XP, I kind of suspect this has nothing to do with this being a beta product.  XP doesn’t give the same error.  I can’t remember what it says, but it basicaly does the same thing, it logs you in under the “Default” profile in windows, which is temporary and you lose everything once you logout.

You might see this error:

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.

Why this happens is a mystery.  I found one article on the MS knowledge base about your account that is a member of Guests or Domain Guests, but that’s not the case for my issue.  I found this article, which led me to a quick fix.  (I doubt a fix permanently though)

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/947242

The solution in that article did not fix it for me.  Also, I’ve heard you can simply logout and back on, but that doesn’t fix it for me either.  What I did was delete the subkey in the ProfileList registy key mentioned in the article above.  If you go in there, you’ll see two keys with the same SID.  One will end in “.bak”, which should be your correct key.  Look within that key for the value of ProfileImagePath.  It should show the path to your windows profile.  Mine, for example, is : “C:\Users\greg”. Now look into the newly created profile key (SID without the “.bak”), this should show ImageProfilePath of “C:\Users\Temp”.   Obviously wrong.

The fix in the article tells you to delete the key with the “SID.bak”, but that just left in the temp profile and didn’t work for me.  I went back in to the registry, deleted the one with the C:\Users\Temp in the path, and then renamed my original one (Which I had exported! Named with the “.bak” and has your correct profile path.) by simply removing the “.bak” at the end.  Log off and back on, problem solved.

I hope this helps!  Backup your registry first!!