Corrupt account, anyone seen this before?

KGhaleon

I had a lady come in, explaining that her files and folders disappeared on her computer. I noticed that her account had been corrupted, and XP home was forcing her to use a temporary account. Following some google information, I turned off "enable write caching on the disk" and restored the system to a restore point from two days ago.

Now the computer boots up fine and her account is working again. However! I noticed that something more bogus is going on...and everytime I reboot the machine, all her settings disappear. Desktop icons align themselves(without that option being on), the start menu is completely blank, the windows screensaver keeps turning "off," and the I can't switch from simple to advanced mode in control panel(horror o_O).

Anyway, to get around this...I created a new account with administrative rights, and it seems to work just fine. I'm going to move the customer's data to the new account before giving the computer back to them. Anyone have any tips or information I could use for the time being?

KG

eurotrash

I don't suppose she has a mandatory profile?

RTmarc

We used to have this problem come up frequently back in the NT4 days. It was the same then as it is now: recreate the user account. I don't see it as often any more with XP or 2000 though.

KGhaleon

I see...yeah, I tried moving all of the data from her corrupt user account to the new one and the problems showed up again. So I created another account with her name and moved only the data vital to her.

It seems to have worked out, so I guess there's nothing more to be done. I have no idea why it happened...she just said she was on the internet running a virus scan, and she only has AVG free...so I doubt there was a conflict with anything else.

(unless she lied)

KG