Techies! - What could cause....

[Lance Bateman]

Came in this morning, my computer (which was turned off last night) had all of the IE stuff wiped, Outlook had to be set up again, desktop links all gone, installed programs such as TAM and etfile had to be reinstalled, direction for "My Documents" set up again - and printer setup gone to main printer.  Of course, taking about half day so far to set everything up again.

Network guy (loosely used term, the treasurer who also controls network) maintains he didn't do anything.

Open for thoughts on what could cause this to happen if no one supposedly touched the computer overnight?

[Charlie Charbonneau]

Did your profile Bork and recreate itself?

[Bloody Jack Kidd]

I'm siding with Charlie on this one... profile.

[Lance Bateman]

As we were finally able to recover most settings, etc., it does look like profile somehow got reset.  Next question, as I've never seen that happen - what could cause that?

[Jon Robinson]

Are you set up on roaming profiles? 

[Lance Bateman]

Nope - though I'd prefer we were.  "He" has to set up and allow profile per machine.

Are you set up on roaming profiles?

[Jeff Golas]

One thing I've seen cause this a LOT is nested folders...a folder inside a folder inside a folder inside a folder....

The total file path is limited to 256 characters...although Windows will let you create a folder that goes beyond that limit...you wouldn't be able to access it and as such, a profile won't load if you create such a folder, say, on your desktop.

There is a reg key you can possibly use to correct the profile...but being at home I don't have it off the top of my head.

[Jeff Zylstra]

Agree on the profile as the cause.  Temporary network unavailability can cause this in roaming profiles, but there are other issues as well.  I had several of these types of things happen over the last few months because my domain controller was not synchronizing the time with an outside time source (a rogue group policy setting).  That caused it to stop advertising as a reliable time source, which led to log on issues and other network connectivity issues. 

Getting back to your problem, Windows can display some of this behavior if critical services don't load on time or in the correct order.   Sometimes it will take 2-3 reboots to get a machine to recognize the profile.  A logoff that is other than "normal" can cause this as well.  Windows updates or other updates that immediately go out to the Internet upon boot up before everything is loaded properly, anti-virus updates or scans, etc....  A lot of things can throw off timing of services loading.   

I usually give the machine 5 minutes to make sure that it booted up OK, then check Task Manager to see what the CPU load is.  If I see some program using CPU time over 2%, I know something is up.   I give it 3 reboots with enough time in between each one before I look at rebuilding profiles or anything like that.

P.S.  Forgot to mention to check the event viewer for any entries before this happened, like the user profile not unloading before shutdown, or other "system" events.

[Mark]

Anytime this happens, I check the C:\Documents and Settings folder and most always there is a profile in there called TEMP that will be the most recent modified profile.  This means that for some reason, you were logged on with a temporary profile.  Sometimes just logging out and back in will solve that.  Other times, something got borked in the current profile and (if you don't have roaming profiles) all you need to do is rename it to like user.old or whatever you want, reboot and login to create the new profile, then copy what you'd like to salvage from the old profile once logged back in.

If roaming profiles are in use, then you'd want to rename the server copy too.