I have been dealing with several problems with my computer. A couple of days ago it worked fine. I shut down for the night. The next day I started up my computer and it would not start. On one of the times I tried to start up my computer I saw my user name disappear from the log on page. There is one other user profile which has no problems. I cannot start up windows xp pro normally or is safe mode. The blue screen error stated registry file failure. Registry cannot load the hive file systemroot\system32\config\software. It is corrupt, absent, or not writable. I found the fix for that in microsoft's article id 307545. Only now I'm getting a stop error 0xc000021a fatal system error. To which from all I have researched I should perform a repair install. There is data on the drive that I do not want to loose so I want to copy as much as I can but I in explorer when I try to open up my profile I am getting an access denied error. My profile is part of the administrator's group. The administrator's profile is still there and there is one other profile who also has administrator privileges is still there and works. When I opened the profile page for that folder the ones with access privileges are the other user and a number that looks like numbers like you would see in the registry. I have never seen this kind of thing. I am fresh out of ideas. Just in case you are wondering I have been able to access the files by logging on the system with an instance of windows xp on a different hard drive.
My system is a PC running windows xp pro. An 160 sata hdd, 1G ram, amd athlon 300 + 2.01 ghz processor. Does anyone have any clues? I'm fresh out. Thanks Jeanette25

When ever you see the GUID (all those numbers) in the Security properties instead of a user name, it is because the user account has been deleted.

To get around the profile problem, you will have to open the securiy properties for the profile folder. Go to the Advanced tab and then select the Owner tab. You will need to take ownership of the folder. Look for the checkbox to replace the ownership on the folder and subfolders. Check that one. Select the user account you are logged in as take and ownership of the folder. Once you do this, your permissions will be replaced with what was there before.

In order to assign permissions to a folder, your account must have FULL CONTROL.

Thank you for your help. If this should happen again that is what I'll do to correct the problem. Due to my other problems, what I did do was a repair install of windows. I down loaded sp1 and sp2 using a different computer to cd. After I installed sp1 all of the applications I had installed suddenly became accessible along with my profile. What I found interesting was when my profile was restored it was restored to my old password. Good thing I remembered it because the other user profile had vanished along with all of their files. Good thing I had a backup of those files. What I don't understand is how my profile was erased in the first place.
Thanks again Jeanette25

Your machine was restored back to a point in time with a System Restore. Just to be safe, get your data off the machine now. We had a server behave like this. It bluescreened and when it came back up, it was running under a previous name and it thought that it was about three years back in time. We had to resynchronize the machine with the domain and reboot. Then it came up in the current time. We had to reboot it again and voilla, three years ago once again. We managed to get some critical files off it before it when legs up. One of the hard drives was failing in it on a mirrored partition.

The power supply went out on this machine. This was the beginning of my troubles. I was working on a project and I suddenly heard a loud snap, which startled me half out of my chair. I replaced the power supply, and slowly but surely I have replaced everything but this hard drive. It was only about a month old at the time and that was about 4 months ago. Do you think the drive got zapped as well, therefore, causing the current problems? I already have backed up all my data. At this moment in time everything seems well.
Jeanette25

Not Too Long Dead Thread.. :-(

WIN XP home SP3

Ran console off the disk to copy and reapir the registry files but I'm unable to accomplish the copy of the file... config\software to the... tmp\software.bak in the repair console.

It says file not found... a re attempt gets file not copied

How can I accomplish the procedure with out this step?

Dell 1505 dell diagnostics found 3 bad read blocks on the HDD but it passes the 'non invasive' and quick tests just fine...

HELP!

-Mike