Several months ago I was a victim of a trashed WIN -10 PRO, 1903 user profile. The account was local and it wasn’t even with administrator privileges. Rebooting repeatedly did not solve the problem and after trying out several other suggested actions, I wound up creating a new account and moving all the data from the old account into the new account.
In reviewing the course of events, I recalled that I had been working in that standard local account (reading a newspaper in Firefox) when WIN announced it had installed a monthly update (the pause had expired) and asked whether to update now or later. Without thinking I clicked on “now.”
After the machine rebooted I was no longer able to access the local account to finish reading the newspaper, and had to begin the fruitless recovery journey.
Since that time it occurred to me that the problem very likely may have been caused by the failure of Windows to save the profile information properly prior to rebooting. So, ever since then, I have begun to be sure to sign out of any account I might be using prior to rebooting for any reason. So far no problems. So I offer that as a suggested “good practice,” as a possible prevention for the trashed user profile problem. (Of course, there are occasions when the machine will undergo a forced reboot with no possible way to sign out, but that occurs a lot less often than the need to reboot following an update.)
BTW, not everyone may realize that there is a difference between a (warm) reboot and a (cold–power off) restart, even though Microsoft is causing confusion by calling both a “restart.” Neither approach was able to resolve my lost user profile problem.
