Is the Disappearing Profile bug still alive and well?

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This morning I logged in to my Win10 Pro v2004 VM, and, after entering my password, ran into the rolling circle of dots that took minutes and a messag
[See the full post at: Is the Disappearing Profile bug still alive and well?]

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Elly, woody, Microfix, geekdom

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I had a similar issue when I used the sleep mode. Recovery from sleep and the user profile wasn’t loading properly. I fix that by logging off before I use the sleep mode.

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This bug shows up on one or two systems a month on our fleet of managed systems. With enough logging in and out and restarts, it eventually goes away and the system goes back to normal. Never have been able to establish a pattern to what causes it since it happens so infrequently. It creates a general state of panic when it happens to a user.

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Elly, woody

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Looks like we have versions and editions disappearing also
PLEASE NOTE from main blog:

Has anyone else seen this lately? Tell us your version of Win10 (v1809, v1903, v1909, or v2004) and the Edition (Home or Pro).

Keep IT Lean, Clean and Mean!

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Elly, PKCano

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Still happening with Win 10 21H1 19043.1586…

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What third party security software are you using?  Anything that would interfere with the boot up process?  It’s a timing issue where something is causing the system to hold the normal user account and thus the system boots up to a guest.

Susan Bradley Patch Lady

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I have not had this happen to me, but I am curious, does this happen for both Microsoft accounts and local accounts? I only login with my local only account for normal daily work.

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This happened on a Local account this time.

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Elly

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Variations of this problem have been around since (or even before) the Windows XP days.

I’ve seen it so many times over the years . . .

Causes are many, and include

-corrupt/weak/bad hard drive sectors (both HDD and SSD)

-malware

-loss of power during a critical write to the users registry hive (this is more common)

-blue screens during a critical write to any registry hive

-a patch that glitched during the user profile upgrade process (I include this as it’s been reported but I have never seen it in person.)

Windows 8.1 and up have fairly robust auto-repair code that detects and attempts to fix the registry related corruption.  Modern hard drives also try to automatically recover lost bits from a newly bad sector and remap good data in the background.  In both cases two reboots will fix it automatically.

In cases where the problem persists beyond two reboots, you will need to create a new profile, and copy all your stuff from the old profile to the new. (But do NOT copy the old registry or %APPDATA% folders.  Just key files as needed from, say, Outlook folders etc.)

More information here:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/14039/windows-fix-corrupted-user-profile

 

~ Group "Weekend" ~

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Elly

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The frequency with which the corrupted profile occurs seems to be increasing particularly with the latest updates. The frequency problem suggests something with updates.

Carpe Diem {with backup and coffee}
offline▸ Win10Pro 2004.19041.572 x64 i3-3220 RAM8GB HDD Firefox83.0b3 WindowsDefender
offline▸ Acer TravelMate P215-52 RAM8GB Win11Pro 22H2.22621.1265 x64 i5-10210U SSD Firefox106.0 MicrosoftDefender
online▸ Win11Pro 22H2.22621.1413 x64 i5-9400 RAM16GB HDD Firefox112.0b3 MicrosoftDefender

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OK. So I allowed the June updates to install and one of the profiles on a multi-user laptop bombed. All four user profile accounts are local; three of the four are standard and only one is an administrator. It is one of the standard (limited user) profiles that will not load. No Microsoft Account profile on this machine. Win 10 Pro 1903. So far restarting multiple times, even in safe mode, has not solved the problem. Will now check out link posted above. Grrrrrrrrr!

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I think I had this issue too month ago – it was on one machine in our company with Windows 10 x64 build 1809 Enterprise. Dell Optiplex 7070.
“We cant log you into your profile, you are logged into temporary account.”
Several attempts after restart, turn off did the job..

Dell Latitude E6530, Intel Core i5 @ 2.6 GHz, 4GB RAM, W10 20H2 Enterprise

HAL3000, AMD Athlon 200GE @ 3,4 GHz, 8GB RAM, Fedora 29

PRUSA i3 MK3S+

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