Hi all,

Some background first.

I have a desktop running windows xp sp2. On this PC, there are three user accounts.
Mine - the admin account,
Mom - my mom's account (limited), and
Guest.

For the past month or so, my mom's account has been reset and the user profile was changed to "C:\Documents and Settings\TEMP"

Luckily, the files were not lost and I just changed it back. However, I did created a mom2 account, thinking that the old profile must've been corrupted somehow.

But, the same thing happened again to the mom2 account. This time I managed to catch a glimpse of the error "something about the user profile not being accessible".

I am not sure what's going on. It's not too serious as the files are not lost but any idea to prevent this from happening?

Thanks.

Don't know what might be causing this myself - but I would recommend keeping the PC "tuned up"

Make sure you have all your MS updates

Run a registry cleaner once in awhile to clear out clutter and unused information in your registry - ccleaner is a registry cleaner and it is freeware - this may help


CCleaner is a freeware system optimization and privacy tool. It removes unused files from your system - allowing Windows to run faster and freeing up valuable hard disk space. It also cleans traces of your online activities such as your Internet history. But the best part is that it's fast (normally taking less than a second to run) and contains NO Spyware or Adware! :)
CCleaner - Home (http://www.ccleaner.com/)

Defrag your drive monthly/bi-monthly

Delete temp files weekly - in IE, click tools and click delete browsing history, I would dlete the first 3 item when that screen comes up

This is of course if you already do this, then no need for above

Hope you get this figured out

I'd start by doing a full surface scan of the hard drive with the hard drive manufacturer's diagnostic utility. Then I'd confirm NTFS permissions are correct on the profile's registry hive files. Next, I'd go searching support.microsoft.com for similar issues. If it started happening a month ago, and automatic updates are turned on, I'd also suspect a Windows Update broke something.

TEMP profiles get created when the actual profile cannot be accessed and loaded.