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Temporary user profile in Windows XP

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by jhendr13

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I have an intetmittent problem on my Windows 2003 domain. Occasionally XP workstations (SP2) get an error when users log in. It states that the users profile could not be loaded and that a temporary profile is being used instead. Usually a reboot will resolve the issue and the user can then log in with their normal profile. Event log messages indicate that the ntuser.dat was in use and couldn't be accessed when the user logged in. I've seen other forum posts about this on the web, but I haven't been able to find anything conclusive as to the root cause. Any thoughts?

5 replies

by jhendr13

I am running Script Logic's Desktop Authority version 7.7. I also use Altiris for desktop management, and run Symantec AV corporate edition 10.1.5.5000.

by sajchurchey

I had a pretty bad problem dealing with this a year or two back. When users were logging out, their registry hive (HKCU == NTUSER.DAT) was by the Anti-Virus program (Trend Micro) running in the background. So the next user to log in would use the previous user's registry hive instead of their own, and this was causing all kinds of weird problems, including temporary profiles some of the time.

After some research, I found a download available from Microsoft called the "User Profile Hive Cleanup Service." Once installed, it runs as a service in the background and forces/waits for programs to let go of the registry hive on logout.

This solved our problem for the most part, but every now and then you may see the error.

You can download the service from:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=1B286E6D-8912-4E18-B570-42470E2F3582&displaylang=en

Install it and see if it solves your problem.

by jhendr13

Thanks. I'll give it a try. In fact, I think I may have stumbled across this before but forgot about it. The biggest problem I have is that the issue is so random. I don't think we've had this problem happen twice to the same user. But I'll see if this does help...

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