Even though I have read every post in this thread, I have not managed to fix my profile.

The corrupt profile is my original administrator profile. I am showing just one SID for this profile, which is S-1-5-21-2170216688-2071831257-1094624962-1002.bak.



I have tried renaming this to remove .bak and had no joy.
I have tried changing the 'RefCount' and 'State' values to 0 and had no joy.
I have tried using System Restore but cannot restore to a point before this profile became corrupt.

Can anyone advise the best course of action from here please?

Originally Posted by Brink

Hello Victor, and welcome to Vista Forums.

Are you able to enable the built-in Administrator account in the STEP ONE section to create a new administrator account to use instead?

If so, then you could just copy what you want from your old account into the new one.

Hi Brink, thanks for the quick reply.

I had tried copying the original user profile files across to a new user profile using a third administrator profile that I had created. I didn't appear to get on too well.

I had followed the steps in this article Fix a corrupted user profile. There were files that were already present in the new profile, so I chose 'copy and replace' (desktop.ini etc. etc.). There were also folders that I couldn't copy ('local settings', 'nethood', 'printhood' etc.).

Thinking about it now, should I copy the individual files from these folders? I kind of gave up with this route as I had to create a new network connection, re-configure my e-mail client and so on. The webmail accounts were ok but my client (WLM) wasn't displaying the message content of my POP3 e-mails. It appears that they have downloaded from the server but I can only see the header. I digress...

I did logon to the built in administrator earlier hoping that I would see an earlier system restore point... alas no. I kind of gave up then.

Do you recommend I try copying from the built in administrator account?

Originally Posted by Brink

Yep, it's better to just copy the individual files and shortcut from the old account into the new account. I find that copying the entire profile usually doesn't work out to well.

Unfortunately, you will have to setup all your settings and email accounts again by using a new account and just copying over files.

Ok, I'll have a bash that tomorrow and let you know how I got on.

Thanks.

There are files that I cannot access, such as C:\username\application data... and C:\username\cookies...

These look to be shortcut folders. How do I address this please?

I am logged in as an administrator.

Okey dokey - looks like I am set then. I guess I can just delete the old user profile from within 'User Accounts' and save the files just in case...

I'm off to the e-mail threads to get that figured out...

Thanks again for your help