Problem loading user's profile on Win2000 - anyone see this before?

[Steve2112]

This is the 3rd time this has happened at my company, and it's a pain in the butt to fix. What happens is a user calls me and says they cannot login to their computer (computers are Windows 2000 SP3 or SP4 connected to a domain).

When you turn on the computer, it boots up fine to the cntrl-alt-delete screen, and then the user enters their password. At that point, you hear the Windows-2000 default startup WAV file play, and then no desktop icons or taskbar appears - nothing.

If you logon as any other user, it works fine and creates a new profile in c:\documents and settings\<username>.

The only way I have been able to fix this is to sign onto the machine, copy the important stuff out of the profile (My documents, favorites, PST mail files, etc.) into another directory. I then go into the control panel, and delete the local profile. I then sign back on as the user, and it re-creates the profile from scratch. I then copy the stuff back into their profile, map drives, add printers, and they are back in business.

It almost seems like the profile is "corrupt", but their are no messages relating to that fact - no messages from Windows telling me the profile is corrupt.

Has anyone run across this problem before? Is there a better/easier way to fix it?

Thanks,

Steve

 

[darkpark]

is this happening to the same user each time? on the same machine? also, are you guys using roaming profiles at all or are they strictly local?
what about permissions? have you checked them the moment this happens to a user?
also, did you check the event viewer? anything significant in there?

 

[Grimmda]

That happened to a lot of users for a couple year span the last place I worked. We were using Win2k sp3/sp4 as well.

We wouldn't even have to leave our desks to fix it either (here's how):

Have the user LOG OFF of their pc
1. Start, Run, \\computername\c$
2. Log in as local admin or it will just come up cause your domain acct. is a local admin
3. Browse to \\computername\c$\documents and settings\
4. Copy their entire profile to \\computername\c$
5. Tell the user to log into their PC (thus building a new profile for them)
6. Once completed with log in tell them to log off
7. Go into their old profile \\computername\c$\oldprofile and highlight EVERYTHING EXCEPT ntuser.dat and ntuser.ini
8. Copy/paste all of that into their new profile under \\computername\c$\newprofile
9. Once complete have client log in and everything should look the exact same but actually work this time.

We found a lot of this happened after migration from one service pack to another or whenever we were pushing updates for IE to their system. We could never narrow down the exact problem but it was only maybe 1 or 2 clients per week (per support guy) when this type of thing did happen so we just called it job security. Sorry for the long winded explanation on how to do this, I was simply doing it for later search references if someone else has the problem and doesn't know.

 

[Steve2112]

Thanks for the reply! I will have to try this the next time it happens in the building... looks promising!