I removed accounts that were hosted on a separate drive before upgrading to windows 8 from 7 yesterday. However, now I get the User profile service service failed the login. User Profile can not be loaded. error whenever I try to access any new account. I've attempted it: from safe mode (suggestions here ) net user test \ADD Editing the permissions on the %sysdrive%\Users\Default folder to ensure it is readable Every attempt is met with the same error. Additionally, I do not see any new entries created in the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList registry entry. I'm not sure I understand why a failed user creation wouldn't trigger an error... but that seems to be what is happening here.