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Windows creating temp profile every time when I login to the PC. The pc has more than one user. I am facing this problem in many Windows 10 and Server 2012 PC's. The temp profile creation is not found in every user. But, in most of the cases it is there.

The Windows 10 is the free upgraded version. Initially, the case was less. Now recently the frequency of the error is increased.

Sometimes this will be solved if I log off and log in again. But, after 2-3 days again this repeats.

Installed Antivirus software: Symantec Endpoint Security, Norton Security and in some PCs Windows Defender.

I have also tried by removing all the services from ‘Services.msc’. But, not solved. I was using Windows 8 and 8.1 as Desktop OS previously and same software and hardware were being used in that also. But, this error was not found before.

Tried solutions: Searched in the internet about the error and found some solutions but none of them worked for me.

  1. Contacted Microsoft support and they tried doing disk cleanup of C drive.

  2. Deleted the temp created folder and changed the temp profile created in the registry HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList.

  3. Enabled the "Do not log users on with temporary profiles" in the group policy as mensioned in Disable temporary user profile on workstations in a Windows 2008 env

All the steps done above did not work instead when I did the 3rd solution I got error when logging in saying "User Profile Service failed the sign-in. User Profile cannot be loaded." Now when I search for this error I got the same result as above mentioned options in Google.

Please help to solve this error and prevent from happening in the future.

Update:

When the OS creates the temp profile I can see 2 logs written in event viewer, which says:

  1. Windows has backed up this user profile. Windows will automatically try to use the backup profile the next time this user logs on.

  2. Windows cannot find the local profile and is logging you on with a temporary profile. Changes you make to this profile will be lost when you log off.

Update 2:

After disc clean in windows 10, the error stopped since from 2 days but don't know whether it is the correct solution.

Below steps are done in Windows server 2012 r2.

  • We can rule out the antivirus, because tried by uninstalling antivirus but temp profile error still repeated.

  • Deleted one user and created new profile for him but after 2 days the error repeated.

IT researcher
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1 Answers1

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I've experienced this issue in some computer, I'll try to explain what I understood of this issue:

  1. Initially you are correctly logged on with a user X on the computer.
  2. Then you logout.
  3. When you log in again with user X, something doesn't works, and windows create a temp profile.

What is happening is that some of the files that windows use to manage use X informations, remaine "locked" during the logout (step 2 of the list). At step 3 windows try to open these files... but they are already locked/in use by other process, so Windows show and error create a temp user profile.

I don't know why those files remain locked, when they shouldn't.
I don't even know which are the files that remain locked.

If Windows have the "Fast Startup" enabled, this issue may happen even after a reboot.

Here is what worked for me on normal PC (I never tried on a server)

If the above steps are not enough, only on a normal computer (NOT on a server), you can try to:

  • Log off the current user without turning off the computer
  • Then unplug the power cable when the computer is still powered on (DON'T do this on a server)

Keep in mind that unplugging the power from a server while it's running could be very bad. Unplugging a normal computer usually wont do any arm, but unplugging a server with RAID Disk could trigger a Raid rebuild, and this is very bad, will lower the server performance, and will take a lot of time, and could require special maintenance procedure... and could also harm the service running on the server.

Now that the "don't do this on a server" is out of the way, the reasoning behind the unplugging the running PC is that it will guarantee you that Windows will do a clean boot, without any cached information. This usually clean the "locked status" on those locked files, that prevent the logon of your user.

Max
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