Windows 7 - Preparing your desktop problem

Hey Friends,

I came across this problem "Preparing your desktop" on my Windows 7 desktop about a month and half ago.  It was annoying and of course it gives you a shock for a second because your personal user profile is not loaded so you don't see any of your desktop settings or your documents where they should be.  What happens is that when you log in, a temporary profile is created due to some problem with user's original profile, so that's why you don't see any of your settings.

I searched around on Google and it seems that other people with Windows 7 have experienced a similar problem and some have been able to resolve it easily and some have had hard time fixing it at all.  I was one of the users who have had hard time fixing it!!  You don't loose any of your data, and it's still intact in the user's folder (C://users/Admin, for example), but the temporary profile creates a temporary folder each time you log in such as TEMP or TEMP.COMPNAME, etc.

In order to get rid of this temporary profile, here is the first thing you should try.
1. Shutdown your PC and start it in SAFE MODE (press F8 couple of times when the computer starts)
2. Login to your Admin account (or whatever account is affected)
3. Go to C://users/ and remove any temporary folders that starts with TEMP
4. Now you will also have to update the the registry entry, so for that, you will need to follow the steps below:
     - Start -> search for regedit
     - Select the regedit program from the list
     - Select My Computer -> HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE -> SOFTWARE -> Microsoft ->
        Windows NT -> Current Version -> ProfileList
     - This lists profiles of all the users listed on your computer
     - Since your computer created the temporary profile, you should see a profile that ends with .bak
     -  That is the correct user profile!!! Because the temporary profile was loaded, the correct and original profile was listed with .bak extension and the temporary profile would have the same number as the original one, but without any .bak extension
     - If you click on the .bak profile, you will see that the ProfileImagePath points to your correct Admin user folder and the other profile points to the temporary folder
     - What you want to do now is, rename the temporary profile by adding a "_new" extension at the end.
     - And rename the correct profile by removing the ".bak" extension from the profile name!!
5. Once the registry changes are made, shutdown the computer and restart as normal
6. Login as Admin (or whatever user that was creating the temporary profile) and check if the problem still exists or not.
7. If you are successfully able to log in, try logging in couple of times because I have had this happened to me where it will work the first time but fail the consecutive times.
8. If you are still getting the temporary profile (aka Preparing your desktop), then it means that your user profile is corrupted.

Here is a second approach to correct the user profile if the first approach above didn't work.  You will have to remove the current user profile from registry and remove the user folder (after backing it up or renaming the current one) along with any temp user profiles and temp folders in order to create a new user profile fresh.  To do this, you need to have another account that has Admin privileges so it can remove the registry entry and rename/remove the troubling folder (Again, after backing it up!! Don't just remove the folder, first back it up completely, or  rename the folder so it's there at least!!).  To remove the registry, you need to go into the regedit same way as described above, remove any user profiles that point to the TEMP folders and mainly remove the user profile that points to the correct user folder.

After you remove the folders (TEMP and the user folder, for example Admin), restart your computer and log in as Admin (or as the user which has problem).  This time you will see "Preparing your desktop" since there is profile to start with.  Once it does that, you can easily copy all your stuff back to the newly created Admin folder under C://users/ and use the computer how you used to before :).

I have tried to explain this problem as much as possible, but if you have any questions, I will try to help you out based on what I had experienced.  Hope you never get this error, because it's a pain, but you never know who runs into it!!