Lost Personal settings after Win7 update

Sul · 21 Sep 2010 at 11:11

Hi

I've got Windows 7 64bit installed and after an update yesterday, I lost all my personal settings - i.e. pinned items on start bar, gadgets and even some programs such as my anti-virus doesn't seem to be starting up in the taskbar.

On restarting from the update, it did get stuck on the Welcome screen so I soft-rebooted it and then it started up but looking as if I just did a fresh install!

Any help appreciated, thanks

Hagar · 21 Sep 2010 at 14:39

Go back to a restore point and then update again.

Swinbag · 21 Sep 2010 at 15:39

almost sounds like it's running a temporary profile or something, is there anything in your documents folders?
if not when you navigate to the users folder (c: > users > [username]) can you still see all of your doc's etc in the relevant folders there?

might be worth a shot with the system restore, I'd back up anything major important first though.

Sul · 22 Sep 2010 at 13:54

I don't have system restore activated unfortunately.

It actually loaded up with some default profile. As far as I can see, the original one is still there but not being loaded. All my docs etc are still there though. Not sure why it's not loading the profile linked to my account.

robinbredin · 22 Sep 2010 at 14:17

That happened to me with Win 7 Pro 64 bit, ended up using my True Acronics, and putting on my backup. Those updates played havoc with my system.

Sul · 22 Sep 2010 at 14:25

Just fixed it! For anyone that has a similar problem in the future - this page helped: http://cherrybyte.blogspot.com/2007/07/fixing-user-profiles-in-vista.html

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList

There was 1 line for each profile. Crucially if a profile is bad there are 3 things worth checking
a) Ensure the key name doesn't end in ".bad"
b) Ensure the RefCount value is 0
c) Ensure the State value is 0