User Profile Go Bye-Bye

[AngelicKnight]

It's been a bad day.

Same user I talked about in this thread.

So during troubleshooting the problem in the above thread, I'm having the user reboot his laptop a couple of times. And whatdya know, as if I didn't have enough to deal with today, upon one such bootup he gets a profile error, a nice userenv event log, and is logged into a temporary profile. And he's remote. Yay.

So this is nothing new; I've dealt with this rather annoying Windows corrupt profile problem my fair share of times and know the drill. Log him out, log in as admin, rename his profile something like .old, log him back in to create new user profile, copy docs/settings from old profile to new one, send user on his merry way. Boss gave me permission to give this user our admin password so I could walk him through these steps over the phone, boss assuring me he'll very quickly forget the login, no worries (shows you how much faith they have in this user). Ok, whatever, done.

So I've copied everything over to the newly created profile. Log out of admin, log him back in...everything's gone. Desktop, docs, etc. -- wait, I copied that over!

Ok, fine. Repeat process. Delete profile, log him in for fresh new profile, except this time --

Windows cannot find domain. Eh? But user login is cached, so that doesn't make sense. Ok, fine, check use dial-up connection at login, login through VPN, domain found, logs right on in, done.

Resolved? Not quite -- It doesn't even create a new profile folder! Instead, I venture into Docs and Settings to find him now storing docs/settings in "temp.domain" instead of "username.domain".

wtf?

So, ok, fine. Not one to give up yet, I try to delete "temp.domain" profile to do this a third time fresh. But wait! "Cannot delete" the profile because it is a "system file".

wtf?

Never seen that happen before. Well anyway, after all was said and done, I had him in temp.domain profile with all his docs, settings, etc. restored. It works, user's happy, fine. So what we're going to do is wait until he brings the laptop in, back everything up, reimage it, and be done.

But I'm wondering, what in the world could of caused this to happen? Is there a way to fix it without just reinstalling Windows fresh? Maybe I've just been lucky not having run into this before?

FYI, boss theorizes that somewhere along the way, the user installing the linksys software is what triggered this to happen. I dunno, I'm skeptical on that, but it really weird timing.