Temporary Account???

[Tunnelcat]

This has happened several times and I exhausted the net looking for a permanent fix. Others are having the same problem from what I've read.

Every once and awhile, I will turn on my machine (Win 7 64bit Professional SP1, bare bones), and it will boot into a temporary account, with only the recycle bin icon on the desktop. This requires a reboot if I want to get into my normal account. I works, but it's a hassle. What's weird is that the only indication that this is going to happen is that after I enter my password and log in, with the proper account name showing on the log in screen by the way, is a "preparing your desktop" warning. I've got another computer from HP and same OS, loaded with crapware, that has NEVER done this.

This only seems to occur after I've used the computer in the previous evening, not during the day. From what I've gleaned on the net, it may be an artifact of some task or process that was running in the background and it was interrupted during the shutdown the night before. Any ideas? I've checked and scanned for any nasties, run the file integrity checker from the command prompt, manually run MSE update, etc., etc, all is OK. I hate to resort to shutting down some of the Windows Scheduled Tasks. It was not something recommended to be done for Win 7 as it was in XP.

[Foil]

I've had it happen once on my work machine, but it was quite a while back (maybe 7-8 months or more), and it occurred after I had accidentally caused a crash. Hasn't happened on my machines at home at all.

[Krom]

Do you have a bunch of programs running in the background? Anything that isn't exiting on time during a shutdown?

[Thenior]

You mentioned your system is barebones, so this may not apply.

Is your system on a domain? If so, there are problems accessing the DNS server, it will load a temp profile. Usually it tells you when you boot up though (a popup by the taskbar, saying you loaded a temp profile).

Also, is your profile saved on a Network drive or anything? For instance, even though the actual profile is saved locally, all the files are stored on a drive (desktop, documents, etc.) - if they lose the connection, they'll just get the default temp desktop.

Have you checked to make sure it's actually loading a temp profile, or are you assuming that just because it has the default desktop?

[Tunnelcat]

Sorry for getting back here late, our phone went out due to the storm we had Saturday evening. Water got into some buried line somewhere and kablooie, some DSL was working and only to Google, and no voice phone at all.

Krom, as far as I know, the only thing running in the background, other than the usual default services or scheduled tasks, is EVGA Precision Pro, which monitors and controls my graphics card. I used to have the Asus utility for CPU monitoring and fan control, but that's been uninstalled since it was a resource hog. I also don't have the defrag program scheduled either. I always make sure to run the MSE definition update manually so that it's happy too, not out there sniffing in the background. Maybe I'm missing an active program?

Thenior, I'm not on a domain, just my home LAN, and I don't get any pop up's when this happens, only a desktop with the recycle bin icon, no personal settings or anything useful. The only warning I get when this happens is instead of "Welcome" after I log in, I get "Preparing your desktop", then I know I'm hosed and have to reboot. The only way to SOMETIMES recreate it is to go surfing in the evening, shut down and when I boot up the next day, MAYBE it will happen. Frustrating.

Now I do have a NAS drive on my LAN, but my profile is NOT saved on it. I do access it for stored files however. But the one evening before it happened, it was not turned on. A clue maybe? Next time it happens, I'll see what name the account is called. Doh!

[Thenior]

Wow, get this... my home desktop started to do the same thing.

Here is how it happened for me. I had created a secondary account, which I now longer needed, so I deleted it. When I shut my system off, it hung up on "Shutting Down" so I did a hard shut off. today, when I went to login, it gave me an error, something about the Group Policy service could not start, access denied. I can't find it right now though

I did some limited research, and it appears to be a registry error. All I did was create a new account with admin privledges, login, and did a system restore. That seems to have solved my problem.

[Tunnelcat]

Yeah, not in my case. The machine that does it has only one account for now, and no other account has been created or deleted as of yet. My other machine, an HP loaded with crapware, has 2 accounts and has never had it happen once. Other than that, they have the identical OS. I checked the registry on the offending system right after a reboot from the temp account and I found no errors, like others online were finding on their machines. And a reboot for the system seems to make everything happy. Go figure.

What was the temp account named Thenior? The account's actual name or something else? I was making an assumption that it was a temp account and kept forgetting to see what it was called in the start menu.

[Thenior]

Yes, the temp account was the same name as my actual account. However, I checked the /USERS/ dir, and it had created a "Temp" directory, though under my user profiles, there wasn't a Temp user. I noticed under my security settings that there was a really strange user name, which I deleted.

What I recall reading was that, although the registry was "correct" meaning no visible errors, something was changed in it that effected your permissions.

Anyway, I hope it doesn't happen again. That waisted my evening..

[Tunnelcat]

Damn, it happened again! Still no corrupted profile upon a reboot and the temp account did have my proper account name. Did some more research on several Microsoft sites. People have come up with all sorts of "fixes", but none seem to be the definitive solution. The main answer I've run into is that some application or service is not releasing it's hooks in the registry when a user shuts down. One person found the culprit to be the Google Updater, but I don't have that on the offending system. Back to square one.

Another "fix" was to wait a few minutes before logging in to make sure the registry mounted correctly. I also found some people getting a hold of the 'Autoruns' program to see which service maybe was at fault. I'm going to try both.

Where was this USER/TEMP directory you found located on your machine Thenior? In the registry or Windows Explorer? I can't find it once I reboot and many posts have said to NOT do anything within that temp account at all, just reboot. Do you have Microsoft Security Essentials either? That was implicated in some posts, although it's on my other machine that hasn't given me any trouble. #$%@ Microsquish!

[Thenior]

I had found a temp account in \users\ in windows explorer. I was also getting Permission Denied when I was trying to do certain things, like transfer ownership of files. Like I said before, I wasn't really able to fix it until I did a restore.