Incorrect Profile Loading

If you have found yourself logging into your computer only to find that all of your desktop shortcuts are missing and your background isn’t the same, chances are Windows loaded the wrong user profile for you. Most times the profile that is loaded is a Temporary user profile. You can find out which profile you have loaded by Right-Clicking on the Start button and Clicking Explore.

As you can see, I have loaded the Administrator Profile.
Your profile that loads should be similar to your login name. For example, John Smith logs in as jsmith and should have profile called jsmith located under /Documents and Settings. If he logs into a domain, such as, “business”, he may see jsmith.business as his profile. It depends whether or not he logged in as jsmith on the local computer and the domain.

What happens if the profile I loaded is not my usual?
You can follow these steps to ensure the next time you log into your machine you load the correct profile.

1. Click Start > Run type Regedit press Enter
2.
3. On the left hand side navigate to the following registry key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE > SOFTWARE > MICROSOFT > WINDOWS NT > CURRENT VERSION > PROFILE LIST
4. Select the folder where your profile image path is located. (i.e. jsmith)
5.
6. Double-Click ProfileImagePath and change the path to the correct profile which user JSMITH should open.
7.
8. Click OK and exit from the registry editor.
9. The user must logoff and log back in for the changes to take effect.

If you never want this to happen again and are looking for a permanent solution, you can try the following hack…

1. Save the Profile List registry key to a location on your hard drive by Right-Clicking and selecting Export.
2. Create a Batch File with the following information:
reg import C:\path\name.reg (Where you define the path and name.)

3. Add the batch file to your start-up script by editing the local computer group policy.

• Click Start > Run Type gpedit.msc > Enter
• Navigate to Computer Configuration \ Windows Settings \ Startup Script
• Add the location of the batch file to the startup script policy.

That’s it!

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