Lost profile/New profile

[maxthedork]

Does anyone know of a reason why a user would lose access to their user profile on login? We've maybe a dozen or so of our users have this problem within the last two months and it always seems to be on a Monday. There's no network activity happening over the weekend that we can isolate, and users are using local profiles. Basically, when they log in they have no rights to their user profile (presumably) and it creates a new blank profile called {username}-{computername}. To get back to the old profile, we log in as Administrator, rename the new profile to "nouser" and rename the old profile to the new profile name. Then we log in as the user and everything works fine. It's just odd that it keeps happening, to random people on random computers. We haven't found any common theme except the aforementioned Monday morning, and the fact that they're all on Win2K/sp4.

Any ideas on why this would happen? Thanks in advance for any ideas (-:

 

[mlconley]

I've seen odd behavior like that when a temp internet file has an excessively long name. The problem is that the file name and directory path exceed 254 charachters.

Also, check your application event log. This may be unrelated, but look for an error with ID 1000 and something about unloading the user profile with an "access denied" message.

 

[maxthedork]

Thanks a lot, I'll check those out. (-:

 

[lamps123]

MlConley and Maxthedork

I just have the same problem; my situation is a bit strange

1st, My w2k server once dead a month ago, and I have to use another machine to make it as a new AD and new domain name; and I copied all the pusername.olddomain to the new username.newdomain. Everything works fine, just some little configurations.

but yesterday, I had the same problem like Mlconley did; but it is kind of funny that:

I am able to find the profile with the folder name: "username"; my documents, favorites are fine EXCEPT the outlook.pst file. the latest or uplated one is located in the username.olddomain\documents and settings\local settings\application data\microsoft\outlook

I have no idea why is that happening all of the sudden, and Maxthedork mentioned that it is related to the long file/folder name (more than 254 characters). It could be true since we have chinese co-workers which read chinese on the web.

And I did have the Event ID: 1001 and 1004 error msg:

Event Type: Warning
Event Source: MsiInstaller
Event Category: None
Event ID: 1001
Date: 8/2/2006
Time: 9:27:46 AM
User: domain\user
Computer: computername
Description:
Detection of product '{00000409-78E1-11D2-B60F-006097C998E7}', feature 'OUTLOOKNonBootFiles' failed during request for component '{168FA211-D0BE-11D1-87C8-00AA00A71E2D}'


and

Event Type: Warning
Event Source: MsiInstaller
Event Category: None
Event ID: 1004
Date: 8/2/2006
Time: 9:27:46 AM
User: domain\user
Computer: computername
Description:
Detection of product '{00000409-78E1-11D2-B60F-006097C998E7}', feature 'OUTLOOKNonBootFiles', component '{8ADD2C9C-C8B7-11D1-9C67-0000F81F1B38}' failed. The resource 'HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\9.0\Outlook\UserData' does not exist.

I also did google the problem and find it could be the registry is corrupted but I still wanna find out what is the main problem

 

[maxthedork]

mclonley:

We just had this happen on another workstation and I checked, and indeed, there were SEVERAL filenames in Temporary Internet Files that were excessively long. I'm going to have to keep an eye on that issue.

 

[lamps123]

It is really really strange, do you guys think it can be Virus? Spyware?

 

[lanceja]

I am having the same problem with one of my 2000 computers. The person lost their profile about a month ago and I was able to restore the profile. Last night they were using the computer with no problem. They did a proper shutdown and everything went down fine. This morning they went in and a new profile was built. I am going to check the Internet items but they always go to the same Internet locations and do not vary so do not think this is the problem. In fact, a couple of days ago they cleared out their Internet files, Cookies and History.

I am going to restore their profile again, but would like to know why they are loosing their profile.

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Thanks

 

[lamps123]

according to mlconley,

It can be the file name is too long... are you users going to some chinese or asian websites???

Cuz 1 chinese character is made of 3-5 english characters ... for a phrase and long name websites, searches, the urls on the websites can cause that long file name... that's the only thing i can think of in terms what of mlconley said