Solved User Profile error

Somehow the admin account on my Vista laptop became corrupted. I cannot even use the guest account w/ override because it seems to generate an internal exception when trying to authenticate the typed password. At this point, it does nothing, failing the override.

I have tried the method described here:
Nigel's blog: Fixing User Profiles in Vista and Windows 7
- Did not work.

To complicate issues more, the registry hive for the admin user also seems to be corrupted. I cannot open certain GUID/SID nodes either - they have no children nodes --- Gives "unable to access" error when clicked."

Is there anything I can do short of reinstalling Vista?
thanks..

Hello Skies, and welcome to Vista Forums.

You might see if the tutorial below may be able to help with this user profile error. Be sure to read all of it for all available options. If you have any questions, then please feel free to ask.

http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/1...-failed-logon-user-profile-cannot-loaded.html

Hope this helps for now,
Shawn

Thanks for the welcome reply :D

The link you posted had the solution to my problem.

Solution ::
1) Reboot in into Safe Mode (Console) under the account with admin perms.
2) Enable Administrator account (net user administrator /active:yes)
3) Reboot into normal mode, log into admin acc.
4) Create new user with admin perms.
5) Reboot; log into the new user
6) Take ownership of the old user's account folder
7) Move entire contents of the old user's folder into the new one. (including hidden appdata folder)
8) Delete the old user, but keep the files (in case you missed something).
9) Disable the administrator account from elevated console (net user administrator /active:no)
10) Reboot and login.

I could not do the regedit method because it would not let me rename the SID key; even in elevated mode (which is weird).

Thanks!

You're welcome. I'm happy to hear that you got it sorted.