Now if you work in IT you would have seen this error a thousand times, today I want to touch on an instance of it I have not seen before.

When having profile login issues usually the first things to try are:

1. Remove old profile folder, Can you login now?

2. Check registry, has the profile now been named with .bak?

 

However today I had an issue with a Windows 7 laptop creating a new profile from scratch.

There was NO user profile folder, nothing in the registry, yet still you get the User profile logon issue. I had taken the machine off and on the domain, could login with our account but not any new users.

The problem was eventually solved with the fix below!

 

Go to another Windows 7 machine (32 or 64 it doesn’t matter)

Go to Windows Explorer and Unhide hidden folders so you can see them.

Locate the default user profile. C:\Users\Default and copy this entire folder.

 

Login to the broken machine, unhide the hidden folders and go to C:\Users\ Rename the old Default folder to Default.old

Copy the folder from the other machine over, go to File -> Properties -> Security and check Everyone has read access.

 

Restart the machine and now try logging into the new user again, with any luck this will solve your issue!