A user last week rebooted her machine to finish applying the MS monthly updates and found that everything in her profile was gone... everything. All of her favorites, desktop items, program listings, all of it was gone. I looked through C:\Documents and Settings\username and foud her desktop items. Loging in and out did not resolve it. Rebooting didn't work, so she said she'd just deal with it. Oddly enough, some of the items returned spontaneously.

I tried the fix that MS suggested by creating a new profile and copying things to the new profile, but that didn't fully work either. In fact, the documents that were moved from the old desktop to the new desktop are now gone, and I can't find them. Problem is that this user is a high profile user and needs those files back.

Anyone have any suggestions? No matter how stupid they might sound, it could be something that I compeltely looked over, so any help would be appreciated.

Login as administrator, then take ownership of the old profile directory. Make a copy of the entire directory someplace else eg a seperate disk or USB drive or something. If the user had logged in again, it may have a new name e.g. Username.001 or something, back that up as well

Delete the old profile(s), get the user to login again so it will create a fresh profile. Logout and login as administrator, and then copy the documents, desktop items, email and favourites to the new profile.

try restoring the system on the date when it was working well

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