denis bider

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"Your user profile was not loaded correctly"

Posted Mar 29, 2010 at 14:39 by denisbider

Last edited Mar 30, 2010 at 14:53 by denisbider

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Google Microsoft technology

Is anyone experiencing the following issue?

About 25-50% of cases after booting, logging into Windows produces the message "Preparing your desktop". This takes several minutes, and then you get logged into a temporary profile instead of your own, and Windows shows a notification stating "Your user profile was not loaded correctly!"
When you check the Application section of the Windows Event Viewer under Administrative Tools, you see messages from User Profile Service with Event IDs 1502 and 1508, and contents that include: "DETAIL - The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process." One of the events mentions specifically that the file is ntuser.dat, belonging to the profile being logged in.

I've had this happen on two laptops consecutively, so the problem must be in some software I've installed, but I don't know what software.

I've read reports on the net that this problem can be caused by Google Updater, a program that's installed with applications such as Google Earth and Google Toolbar. Apparently, Google Updater can lock the file that contains a profile's registry, and that prevents the profile from loading correctly.

However, I have uninstalled Google Updater, and the problem has occurred again, in the exact same way, since then.

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Showing 4 out of 4 comments, oldest first:

Comment on Apr 1, 2010 at 13:41 by Anonymous

1) Do a backup of all important files.
2) Try this:
http://www.vistax64.com/vista-general/213155-user-profile-failing-load-but-only-occasionally.html.

Comment on Apr 1, 2010 at 14:39 by denisbider

It doesn't seem that applies to my case. My Event Viewer is showing different event IDs (1502 and 1508), and the page you linked to doesn't contain a solution specifically for the poster's problem in the first place:

- KB812339 is for when the profile has been entirely deleted;

- the VistaX64 tutorial 130095 is for when the logon attempt doesn't succeed at all;

- the VistaX64 tutorial 135858 is for when the profile has been deleted or corrupted.

My profile is not deleted nor corrupted. The problem is that some boneheaded application is locking my registry when I'm trying to login...

Comment on Apr 6, 2010 at 12:55 by Anonymous

Maybe you should first try Process Monitor from Windows Sysinternals and find out which process is "locking" ntuser.dat at the boot time.
From web:
"If you disable all the Google Updater services and scheduled tasks and still have the problem, try running Sysinternals' "Process Monitor" (it's free) and logging only registry events "RegLoadKey" and "RegUnloadKey" and see who is causing your problem. Note that you may have to leave Process Monitor running for several hours or even days in order to catch the culprit.

NOTE: It's not sufficient to run Process Explorer or other programs to determine which process has the users' profile files locked (NTUSER.DAT) because when a program requests a users' profile to be loaded then the SYSTEM process actually does the loading, not the process that requested that the profile be loaded."

Comment on Apr 9, 2010 at 19:06 by Anonymous

I 've had this case, without the google tollbar installed. I created a new profile and transfered what i needed. Then dropped the old user.