Vista Login Error, any suggestions?

[LordJaffa]

I've been given a laptop to fix running Vista (Pre SP1 it would seem).

Any time the user attempts to log in, login fails with the following message:

The Group Policy Client service failed the logon
Access Denied

I've read that the solution is to delete the profile and create a new one, but any new profiles created hang on logon. The failed profile works in safe mode, and when trying to sign into the repair service under the account "Administrator" it states that the account is disabled.

It's not too much of a problem to format and start from scratch, but obviously it's not the most convenient or helpful of methods.

Another thing is that the user has been putting the computer into hibernate lately, as Vista started erasing changes made to the profile every time it was restarted. I'm going to assume that this has added a new twist to the problem and is why no other accounts seem to work.

Anyone had either of these problems? And if so, how did you resolve them?

Thanks in advance to anyone with some useful information on this.

 

[ChingChang]

it would load the default profile every time it was restarted?
ntuser.dat could be corrupt, might be bad sectors on the hard drive. I'd run chkdsk /r

 

[LordJaffa]

Vista forced a checkdisk on restart one time, but no bad sectors were found. I read of a fix that seems to work in most cases, so I'm going to give that a shot, but thanks for the suggestion, will report back what this method turns out.

Solved it, had to delete the profile information from registry then copy all the user's documents to the new profile location.


In case anyone else needs to find out about it:
In regedit, go to:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList

Then find the profile that's been affected, delete the whole folder for the profile, sign in to the profile and it'll create a new user area.

Then just copy the contents of the "C:\user\user_name" folder to the new folder and hey presto.