Vista - User Profile Error - Logged on with a Temporary Profile

So I too fell victim to the "Your user profile was not loaded correctly! You have been logged on with a temporary profile." Your tutorial was simple and easy to follow, however, I have stumbled into a bit of an issue:

At step 10, There was no folder for the user that I was restoring, so I just copied the backed-up user into this teporary user, properly merged. I tested files from the old user and they worked. So I went ahead and started renaming this restored user from "profile2" to "Jonathan" and the admin account that I was using "pro3" to "Admin", fine. I opened up MY COMPUTER and noticed that I was short 14gigs of space, equivalent of the backed-up user. So I then went into the C:/User and found the user "Jonathan" along with "pro3", and "profile2", the new names were not there and the last modified dates for all of the folders/users were dated. I wen't ahead and shutdown the laptop ad then restarted it, nothing had changed.

The problem is that now I'm short 14gigs of space that I want back and dont know what to do...
In essence I am guessing that the user had actuallyeen restored but I didn't where to pul it from, can I just delete it?


Much apreciated.

Hi Reefwalker,

Welcome to Vista Forums.

I would backup anything you did not want to lose from the user profiles that you want to delete, then go into User Accounts in the Control Panel (Classic View). From there you can delete the users you do not want safely. Just be sure to leave yourself an administrator account to work with.

Hope this helps,
Shawn

SHAWN!! You are a life saver, thank you so much, your solution worked for me too. Any time you need a couch to crash on, I got your back. Dell wanted me to reformat. Now my problem is weirder though. I had to activate the real administrator from safe mode and did everything else and got to the part of setting up my new profile, as an administrator. I think whn I changed the name of the new administrator user It became the 'real administrator' cause when I tried to deactivate the real admin it also disabled my newly operating user profile...I think I am now operating as the reactivated 'real' super administrator. Should I do anything differently when I try to create another user account to use? Should I still deactivate the real administrator? Do I need to?

Hi Bolderkev, and welcome to Vista Forums.

Normally, it is not a good idea to rename a user account to prevent any potential conflicts with it. Instead, it best to create a new account and delete the old one.

You can leave the built-in Administrator account enabled if you like. It can come in handy if you needed it a pinch to repair another user account. I would be sure to create a password for it to help prevent people you do not want using it to be able to log on to it.

Hope this helps,
Shawn

Is there an easy way to do this, i'm afraid i will delete the wrong user

Hi Meena, and welcome to Vista Forums.

You can do a System Restore using a restore point dated before the error to see if it can fix the problem.

System Restore - How to

Hope this helps,
Shawn

Hey Shawn, so in my brevity I think I missed the point. While logged on as the built-in admin. I created an admin. profile and named it. I logged in to that profile and deactivated the built in which also disabled my new admin profile. Now, I am using the built in admin profile as my primary. am I ok? I'll mention also, when I innitially got the 'C:/users is corrupt and unreadable' error, I had not ever moved, changed or renamed any user folders and still don't know what happened or what I would have done without the hidden built-in. I was totally freaking out 'till I found you. now, I'm begging you to save me from myself and advise me oh wise one. my lapop is physically secure and I'm the only user. thanks again!
p.s. I think Meena is worried about the registry key deletion part. that part worried me too, though I found the subkey (with .bak)with the right user name in one of the data fields. I had no restore points

Bolderkev,

Working in the built-in Administrator account is fine. You just have to remember that everything has full access to your computer while you are logged on to that account. For that security reason, it's usually best to use a default nonbuilt-in Administrator account instead.

Did you create a password for the new admin. account before disabling the built-in Administrator one?

Can you still create other accounts and log on to them?

Hi,

I have followed your instructions and it worked, thank you very much, I have created the user administrator and now is disabled and by using this user id I copied the folders from my previous id (the one that did not work) and copied it to the new user, then when I checked all my files on my new id I deleted the old ones.

thank you again,

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

Shawn