Finding underlying cause of Window 7 Account corruption.
- by Carl Jokl
I have been having trouble with my Sister's computer which I built.
It is running Windows 7 Ultimate x64. The problem is that I have had problems with the accounts becoming corrupted. First problems manifest themselves in the form of Windows saying the profile failed to be loaded properly and a temporary profile. Eventually the account will not allow login at all. An error message along the lines the authentication service failing the login.
I have found information about this problem and how to fix it. The problem being that something has corrupted the account profile and backing up and recreating the accounts fixes the problem.
I have been able to fix things and get logins working again but over the period of usually about a week it happens again. Bit by bit the accounts corrupt and then it is back to square one.
I am frustrated because I don't know what the underlying cause of the problem is i.e. what is causing the accounts to be corrupted in the first place. At the moment I am just treating the symptoms.
I was hoping someone who may have more experience with dealing with this problem might be able to help me find the root cause.
Some articles suggest that Norton Internet Security is a big culprit of this problem which is installed. I could try uninstalling Norton and see if it helps.
The one thing which is different about this computer to any other I have built is that it has a solid state drive. Actually it has both a hard drive and solid state drive. The documents and settings i.e. the Users directory is stored on the hard drive. This was done following an article about moving the user account data onto a separate drive on Windows 7 which I found on the Internet. Moving the User accounts is more of a pain under Windows 7 and this solution involved creating a low level file system link to the folder from the boot drive (Solid State) to the Hard Drive. The idea is that the computer behaves just as if it is accessing the User's folder from the boot drive but actually the data is stored on the hard drive. This may have nothing to do with the cause of the problem but due to the problem being user account corruption it is a possibility I have not been able to rule out.
Any help would be appreciated as I would be glad to see the back of this problem.
