"The User Profile Service failed to Logon..."

[Albion]

The User Profile Service failed the logon. User profile cannot be load"

I'm working on a Windows Vista Basic edition laptop. My user first had this problem about a month ago. I fixed it by deleting the .bak SID entry in the registry under ProfileList. This seemed to work great. I was able to log in with no problems at all. I gave the user back his laptop and he was happy.

This week the user brought the laptop back with the same problem. Sure enough, when I went into the registry the SID .bak entry was back. Not only was it back for the user, but also the Administrator account that I enabled the last time I fixed this problem. The strange thing is that even though the Administrator account SID had a .bak file, I was able to log into it without getting the error. The users main account on the other hand was unable to log in, giving the error above.

The fix is easy enough, but I'd like to stop the symptoms from coming back. Does anyone have any idea why this keeps happening? There are a ton of articles on the internet about this problem but they only address fixing the symptoms, not the underlying problem.

Thanks.

-Craig

 

[linney]

Among all the things that you have tried did you try resetting the Security back to the default settings.

How do I restore security settings to the default settings?

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/313222/

Fix a corrupted user profile

http://windowshelp.microsoft.com/Windows/en-US/help/769495bf-035c-4764-a538-c9b05c22001e1033.mspx

Try running ChkDsk to check your drive for errors. Right-click your Drive icon/ Properties/ Tools/ Error Checking. Try it first by not checking either box (this will run it in a Read-only mode) to see if it flags any hard drive or file problems. If it does, restart it by ticking both boxes, and rerun it to allow it to attempt to fix any found problems.


The hard drive manufacturer will have free diagnostic software that is bootable, or that may even run from within Windows, that will thoroughly check the condition of your hard drive.