how to recover my user profile

I have a laptop with windows vista home premium operating system.

I opened some video in real player and the system got stuck.
I have forced power down my system.

After that my system did not start up, and I have to login in safe mode and
shutdown it properly.
When I login, it logged in with temperary profile. I followed the suggestion
in the help centre to create another profile and copy all the files into new
profile and login into the new profile.

I could successfully login into the new profile. But, with the new profile I
have the following problems.

My internet settings got lost and I could not connect to internet. I have
gone to my old profile (temperary mode itself) and checked that the network
settings were intact there. I could not get them in the new profile. I tried
setting up new network connection, but it failed. And I could not modify
other user accounts using this profile even if I configure it to be
administrator profile (I could do all this from my temperory profile).

I tried disabling the User Account Control, after that I could use all these
features.

Even after that, I could not setup library of either the windows media
centre or the windows media player to use the music in music folder of my new
profile.

Is there any way to get rid of these multiple profiles?

I don't think I can use system restore because it shows only one restoration
point, that is dated after the user profile crash.

I am ready to re-install my windows again, because it does not have much
useful stuff and I can go for a backup before doing it. But I have a doubt
here. I have some limited period offers that came along with my laptop and
they would work till 31st may. If I re-install my windows, will those offers
exist or I will loose them also?

Please help,I wasting most of my time in the day for this debug since a week.

On Sun, 8 Apr 2007 09:40:01 -0700, SRPrasad

>I have a laptop with windows vista home premium operating system.

>I opened some video in real player and the system got stuck.
>I have forced power down my system.

>When I login, it logged in with temperary profile. I followed the suggestion
>in the help centre to create another profile and copy all the files into new
>profile and login into the new profile.

As you've discovered, this is a "lossy fix".

Yes, it gets the OS breathing so the vendor support can hang up with
the job "done", but considerable impact remains, because you've still
lost your original user account registry.

In XP, what I'd do in a case like this is:
- boot off a Bart CDR (search for "Bart PE")
- harvest all SVI "snapshot" contents for safekeeping
- harvest a previous NTUser.dat from C:\SVI\..\RPxxx\snapshot
- rename away any existing/re-spawned NTUser.dat
- drop in harvest previous copy
- try starting the OS into that account again

In Vista, one might attempt the same, either via Bart or by booting
the Vista DVD into the Cmd prompt, etc. but I don't know Vista well
enough to know where to harvest old registry hives etc.

You could also try a System Restore rollback to before the system ate
its registry, which would do much the same as the above.

>Is there any way to get rid of these multiple profiles?

You may find that as long as there is a TEMP within the user accounts,
your settings may not "stick". I've seen this in XP; dunno if Vista
behaves the same way. If so, removing the TEMP from the users subtree
from outside the OS (Bart CDR boot etc.) may fix.

>I don't think I can use system restore because it shows only one restoration
>point, that is dated after the user profile crash.

Bummer.

This is a pretty grim inditement on the fragility of Vista. I don't
know why, but XP was rather prone to eating its user account
registries, and I'd get fed up with the way that this was fobbed off
with an "oh well, yes, it does that sometimess <shrug>" response.


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Never turn your back on an installer program
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