Windows 8 Temporary Profile Issue

24 Apr 2015 in TIL

When I booted Windows today, I was presented with a message that says that I've been given a temporary profile.

Most of the instructions I found revolved around running sfc /scannow, but when I tried that I was told that the system was already locked by another process.

I checked when Windows Update last ran, and it looks like there was an update last night, which seems like it might be something to do with it. A bit more googling took me to this page which I'm going to summarise here for myself in future / in case that page disappears.

  • Run regedit as administrator

  • Find the path HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList

  • Look at the keys in this path. Two of them (they're quite long names) will be named the same, but one will have a .bak suffix.

  • Rename the one without the suffix to have .new at the end

  • Remove the .bak suffix from the other one

  • Reboot your machine. It should start applying a Windows Update

  • Log in, everything should be fixed