Just starting up my PC this morning and an error messge comes up along the lines of "cannot load locally stored profile, it may be corrupt'

and it loads a temporary profile which has none of my desktop or layout of software etc.

The User folder is there in Documents and Settings along with all my desktop and favourites etc.

How do I fix it so that Windows will load my profile at start up again?

Using XP home edition.

Thanks

When you boot your PC is your Windows XP password protect? If so leave for about 15 secs before entering password.

This gives your PC time to fully boot up. Common problem with Windows 7 on Notebooks.

meant to reply to this the other day - sorry for the delay.

most likely this is caused by a bad spot on your hard disk, often checkdisk will solve it - right click on your C:\ drive and select properties, click tools tab and select ckeck now, click on both checkboxes and click ok - it will tell you the drive cannot be checked because it is in use, say yes to check on next startup and restart. if that doesn't do it you can create a new user and copy everything to the new profile, but my bet is this will solve your problem. chok dee!

Errors on disk (check first) or the result of an improper shutdown. No need to create a new user profile, the old one can be restored from the System Restore backups automatically or manually.

Hope it wasn't your Admin account, if yes.....

Had the same error years ago, and believe me, I tried everything to get it working again.

At least, I could login again, but there were unexpected error messages almost every day.

Did a Full Backup (Acronis), changed the harddisk, restored the backup, but had to create a new user-profile, to get rid of the error messages.

Admin account or not is irrelevant if System Restore is on and functioning properly. Time to fix - 10 minutes or so.