So I came into work this morning, booted up my Windows 7 RC laptop and after logging into my profile, got the message “Location is not available – C:\Windows\system32\config\systemprofile\desktop refers to a location that is unavailable. It could be on a hard drive on this computer or on a network. Check to make sure that the disk is properly inserted or that you are connected to the Internet or your network, and then try again. If it still cannot be located the information might have been moved to a different location.”
There were also no icons on my desktop with the exception of the recycle bin, “my computer” and “my documents.” When I tried to open “My documents,” it said access DENIED. (But dangit they’re MY documents!!) So I right clicked on the My Documents folder and verified that my username had full access to my My Documents folder as did the Administrator group to which I belong. I then checked the owner tab, and the owner of My Documents was listed as [i]computername[/i]\Administrators. I checked the c:\users\(my profile) owners and I did not own my own profile. I made myself the owner of my profile, and everything under it, rebooted and all my stuff was back and mine again.
My boss, whose laptop is a couple years newer than mine, but he’s also got Windows 7 RC, got the same error message this morning, and the owner of HIS profile folder was SYSTEM. Again, we made him the owner of his profile, rebooted, and everything came back.
I googled the error message we were getting and found several instances of the same error message, but no real indication of what could be causing it (other than someone suspects Norton/Symantec products – which we’re currently testing in our enterprise environment and have been for about a week) and there seem to be as many fixes for the issue as there are users. The last time my system received a Windows update was 12/1/09.
Also, apparently, this same issue occurred in Vista and it’s not fixed in 7.
Links I found in my googling:
http://forums.techguy.org/windows-vista/808717-solved-c-windows-system32-config.html
http://nw360.blogspot.com/2008/11/location-is-not-available.html
http://forums.techarena.in/vista-help/801087.htm
Anybody else have any insite into this?
Thanks,
Jess
