Windows Corrupt Profile - Why does it happen?

mokkapoop

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Jun 6, 2005
Messages
1,155
I am here to ask why profiles corrupt in Windows. Does it only happen for Windows 2K or for all OS's?
 
I get tickets for this all the time, and usually find windows has created a new profile and tacked a .000 on the end of the original name.

It most certainly does happen in XP. A lot.

Vista seems to be a bit different. It seems to create a temporary profile instead of a permanent replacement.

Why it happens? Who knows. I've seen it on Laptops with 4 year old loads, and then again on machines with loads 2 days old.

And this can be a real mess if Active Directory is involved.
 
What causes it to happen?

Is there a way to prevent this from happening?
 
Lots of things can cause it. Most common, I'd think, would be a failing hard drive.

RAM issues, malware, power supply issues, power interruptions during logon/logoff, badly written programs, file deletions.....

All of the above, of course, symptoms of a machine which isn't well-maintained.
 
Good answer to "why" questions (especially this vague)?

"I don't have a clue."

It's really a good answer, and 99% of the time, it's the truth. I had it explained to me this way by an instructor, and it clicked. It took 5 years and 10,000 different people to create windows 2K. That's the OS alone, not 3rd party vendor drivers or any add-on software. Much less the hardware itself. These numbers may not be accurate, but paint a good picture.

How the hell is any one person going to be able to explain how all these things interact? You aren't. Knowing how to find information to fix something is much more useful than knowing "why" something happened.

It could be one of a million things. Bad: user software, memory, HDD, data cable to the HDD, virus, spyware, software diver, etc, etc, etc.

Are you willing to track ALL these things down (some of which you don't have access to key information like source code), or just fix the problem?
 
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