Cause of user profile not loading
The question is:
What causes a user profile not to be loaded in Windows domain based network?
the answer is:
there are probably 3 broad reasons for this,
1. the user corrupted their profile somehow, such as shutting down without logging off (hard power off)
2. the connection to the domain was lost ungracefully, and offline information was not copied entirely, causing a mismatch of some encrypted profile data, (effectingly corrupting again) and preventing the logon.
3. an unknown event took place between the last time the user sucessfully logged on, and this time where the profile is now not loading. this could be hardware related (faulty Hard disk), RAM parity errors( bad memory), a change to the user profile SID details on the domain controller or other domain change.
Usually the cause is not so much a problem, unless it consistantly reoccurs.
Fixing it however, in XP is fairly easy.
with an account with domain admin rights, just navigate to the UNC path "\\computername\c$\documents and settings" - note the name of the folder/user affected, and just .old their profile folder.
example, username is Philip. - you see in their c:\documents and settings\ folder the folder called Philip, rename it to philip.old or something else.
You have to ensure this is done while the user is logged off, as files in this folder will be in use otherwise. potentially useful to reboot the computer before navigating to the profile folder.
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