Windows XP profile corrupted

[unix]

This thing never ceases to amaze me, just when I thought I discovered all the warts - here is a new one.  One day log in to my XP workstations (I have Seven on another HD that I use sometimes) and all my documents are gone, the background pic, everything. They say something about corrupted profile. I did find the files and copy them to another location and tried to restore it. Not sure if it's something I did or the restore worked but the next time I logged in, all went back to normal.

Unbelievable.  It's like getting in a car and have the engine fall out of it.

Is this a sign that the hard drive is going bad? I shut down the machine properly, no power outages or anything.

Mental note: Make backups and plenty of them.

[TRexx]

I see this all the time on the XP systems my client provides.  About once a week someone in my group will try to logon and find their world has ended. Fortunately we can call our Help Desk, go through the standard "have you rebooted" dance, then wait a few hours for it to be restored.   

We think it's related to some setting that automatically puts the PC into hibernate mode. But since we don't have admin access its hard to know exactly what is happening.

[pxsant]

Once in a while I have customers who report this problem.   In most cases they have logged in with the wrong ID and get a different desktop as a result.   Any chance you made this same mistake?

[unix]

No, it was the right account...

And it' an admin account if that makes a difference.

It scared me so much I think I will move everything to Seven.

[pxsant]

It scared me so much I think I will move everything to Seven.

That is jumping from the frying pan into the fire.  Do you have any apps which will not run on Windows 7?  How about hardware like printers or scanners which will not have drivers?  You are likely to end up with more problems than you bargained for.

Use Acronis to make a full backup to an external drive before you jump off the bridge just in case.  You may even have a hardware problem like a hard disk about to go so a backup right now is critical.

I would make any move with extreme caution.

[benali72]

This loss of the profile happened to me once, too. Ever since then I make a specific "profile backup" to cover it.  I make this in addition to my specific Email backup and the generic Windows System Restore point backups.

Maybe I should look into Acronis or similar tool... somehow it seems easier for me to backup Linux (just copy the partition(s) to a second drive) than it is to backup Windows.

I haven't heard of this problem under Windows 7 -- but I haven't really asked about it, either. I don't run 7 myself.