Perplexed: Input Required

[Caged Anger]

My folks have a cheapo dell Dimension E521 with standard specs.
It encounters this odd problem whereby every couple of months the user profiles go wrong. The files and folders are still intact but it seems to forget where the profile is, or so I thought.

This last time happened today when my mum tried to log into the machine. It said her profile was unavailable and a temporary one would be used instead. When i logged in as the Administrator it did the same thing. My Dad's profile is the only one never affected by this problem. What I noticed this time is that the difference between the admin + mum accounts and dad's acct is that ntuser.dat was in use for both of theirs but not in his. Safe mode these opened fine, therefore i went and reset the ownership of the files to each of the respective accounts and now the profiles load fine.

I am out on a limb on this one and google doesn't seem much help. All it has to offer is some stuff about corrupted registry hives which does not seem to pertain to this problem. ANy advice or input would be greatly appreciated as always.

[ME BIGGD01]

Chks to see if you are logging into a roaming profile or a domain. Look at default paths to user profile.

[Caged Anger]

Checked through the registry and all paths were accurate. It isn't that it can't seem the files, its that something every so often locks up thsoe files, makign them inaccesible to the system and thus causing the roaming profile to kick in by default

[ME BIGGD01]

What you might want to try and do is creat another user acount and copy all the user files to that user account and see if that fixes the issue. Just delet old user account once things are all transfered. Its a simple and fast way to see if something got corrupted in that account.

I have seen this problem when unable to log on to a Domain.

[Caged Anger]

Have done that twice in the past year with Mum's account. For some reason Dad's is never affected. What was real weird this time round was that the administrator account had the problem too...