evil spawn of user profile

[jlockley]

W2K has taken to repeatedly replicating my profile in a sorcerer's apprentice kind of way, placing 43 new profiles and as many .bak files in the documents and settings file, reverting to the most recently created every time I restart it. This, of course, separates me from a great deal of my data and shoots preferences to hades in a hand cart.

After a long session with a MS tek who couldn't figure out why but things that resetting the default probably cleared it up I am left with my actual profile, which is not universal, as at least MS office only recognizes the settings of myprofile.machinename.043, or the last profile (I believe the official name is personality) created. Although the profile I need, myname, is available, the W2k demons prevent deletion of .043.

Does anyone have insights into this peculiar and thoroughly annoying behavior? Although a peer to peer network was installed about a month ago, btw, this only began happening about two weeks ago. No new programs were installed, no settings changed, and the machine is armed to the teeth against virus attacks. As a matter of fact, the first instance was the Monday after the system change for daylight savings time. It appears that the issue may have started earlier, as there is a log file containing access denied information, which I never received as an error message.

The replication seems to have occured every time the computer was rebooted. The evil spawn of profile took up abouta gb of space with over 12K individual files.

Very nice tek first indicated that this might be due to update rather than clean installation, which, when I pointed out that I expected a MS failure to be fixed completely by them (tech dept is not so sure they want to go through the entire mess, and I can see why) was retracted quickly as in "what I said was that installing according to directions would NOT cause this."

So: IDeas? How do I rid myself of evil spawn .043 and return to justmyprofile ? (as opposed to justmyprofile.HAL.043 - justmyprofile.HAL.001 through justmyprofile.HAL.042 have been successfully deleted, but like the eggs in Tremors, I fear 43 left intact may yet reproduce. Horrors, I say. Horrors.)

 

[ShadowGrafix]

Have you logged in under the administrator login and pass and tryed to delete all users.....reboot....then recreate you user that has been corrupted?....You also said ur armed to the teeth with Anti Virus Utilities but it may be possible you have let a dll file or some sort of script into ur current user profile....if i did not shed any insight on this matter please let me know so i may be prepared for this horror if it ever arises...Thanks

 

[prescot9]

jlockley,

Win2k will create new profiles for new users, too. If you log on as a "local" account as "jlockley", it would not be the same as logging on as "jlockley" using a "Domain" account. There would instead be entries similar to:

c:\documents and settings\jlockley

and

c:\documents and settings\jlockley.domain.com

Where "domain" would be the authority where the Domain account was created.

Further, if you "disjoin" the Win2k PC from a Domain, and change it to a "Workgroup", there will be yet another account. If you for instance rebuild your Server, and create an new account for "jlockley" even if the Domain is the same name, the account will have a different "SID", or security identifyer - so ther will another folder for "jlockley.newdoamin.com, or perhaps it will have ".001" appended to it.

Whatever the case remember this simple rule as the other poster suggested:

Whenever you need to "work" with accounts, delete them, copy them, or move them, be sure to log on as the local Administrator before working with them. In this way, you will be able to delete/destroy ANY account, except for the one you're logged on with, the "Administrator".

You may have a "c:\windows\profiles" folder, that serves as the account location, instead of "c:\documents and settings", if you upgraded from a PC that was running Windows 95, or 98, that was enabled for individual profiles, but the rules remain the same...

Rich
prescot9@hotmail.com
Father, Geek, and MCP

 

[jlockley]

Late return to this topic: It was fixed with about three days work with a tech up in Redlands. This seems to be an occasional corruption. Windows has a repair tool for part of it, but the process is extremely long and tedious. For the why of it, she merely indicated that it simply happens some times. Doesn't seem to be anything the casual user is outfitted to repair.