What appears to be a new user appears

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Fired up computer yesterday to be greeted by what appeared to be a new Windows install: empty desktop showing only recycle bin and shortcut icons for Edge and Chrome; only a few icons in the taskbar including Mail and MS store icon, neither of which I use; shortcuts/bookmarks missing from Edge; file associations gone. System allowed me to log in to machine without logging into Microsoft account.  Thought perhaps an update had done this, but checking update history no update shows. Digging into Explorer, I see my User with all the Desktop Download, Documents, etc folders and the contents I had in them. So I conclude I don’t have a fresh Windows install, instead it appears Windows just made a new user.  I can log into both my Microsoft 365  business account and Office 365 E3 account, as well as my personal account at Live.com. How do I get my “old system” back, or do I need to rebuild everything all over again?

Running “Feature Update to Windows 10 21H2 via Enablement Package (KB5003791)” installed 5/5/22 and “Update for Micrsoft Windows (KB5013624)” installed 5/12/22

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Try shutting down the computer and restarting it?

Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher

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Several times.

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If Susan’s suggestion didn’t work…

I don’t know if this is your issue but I’ve had something similar in the past where widows has (randomly from my visibility) logged me into a temporary account.

You can check whether this is the cause as follows:
1. In Command Prompt, type “wmic useraccount get name,sid” and press Enter.
2. Look for your user name and note it’s SID – usually a number in the 1000’s for normal users.
3. Open registry editor “regedit”
4. Navigate to “computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Profilelist”
5. Look your SID. If there is two entries (e.g. xxxx-1001 and xxxx-1001.bak) then your issue is the same as I experienced. The “.bak” entry is your original ‘good’ account. The non-.bak entry is the temporary account.

You can fix this by:
1. Delete the entry WITHOUT the “.bak” (or rename it as “.bak2” or something else).
2. Remove the “.bak” from the remaining entry.
3. Log off/on and it should be fixed. If it is fixed and you renamed the WITHOUT entry at step 1 instead of deleting it you should delete it now.

You can read more about this by searching for: fix “temporary profile”.

Hope that helps.

1 user thanked author for this post.

WSAuggie

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Thank you; I will effort this and report.

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Yes — that did it! Thank you very much!

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Glad it worked.

I’d love to know what causes it as I’ve had it happen, probably only 2 or 3 times in a decade (not often I know). All seems good, using computer, shutdown but on restart the next morning the ‘temporary account’ issue occurs. It’s probably one of those things I’ll never get to the bottom of but at least I know how to fix it.

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