…How’s that for good grammar?
Anyway, this error popped up for me in Windows 7 the other day. After the computer boots up, you click on your user icon, type in your password, and BAM! “The User Profile Service failed the logon. User profile cannot be loaded.” And then you are logged off, and stuck back at the user select screen.
If you’re having this problem, hopefully you have another account on the computer that you can sign in to. To fix it…
- Sign into another Windows account.
- Run the registry editor.
- Navigate to HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList.
- Look at the sub-keys here in the form of S-1-5-21-XXXXXXXXXX-XXXXXXXXXX-XXXXXXXXXX-XXXX.
- One of them is probably duplicated with the extension “.bak.” Remove (or backup) the one without the .bak, and then rename the remaining one, removing the .bak extension.
- Log out and try to log in as your troublesome user. Should be fixed now!
Now, why did this happen in the first place? I think it has something to do with Windows Backup creating a backup copy of the profile during the backup procedure, and then being interrupted or something and not restoring things to how they used to be. Maybe there are other scenarios that can cause this problem as well. In any case, I hope this helps someone!
By the way, while this happened to me on Windows 7, I understand that the error can occur on Windows Vista as well.
Tags: Windows 7, Windows Vista
If none of them has the “.bak,” then the cause of your problem is not the one that I uncovered here. At the moment, I don’t know what else it could be… sorry I can’t be of any help!
This same problem has occured now twice when trying to set up my new computer, transferring the old accounts with easy transfer. After the first time I did a clean install of windows 7, that fixed it temporarily, but now the problem has re-occured! I don’t want to reinstall windows every two days!
Trying out the proposed solution, I have the following comments: My profile list shows 5 entries, none of which has the . bak.The two working user accounts are represented by a long,almost identical series of numbers. The profile image shows which ones they are. The troublesome account is not present. The other three short numbered profiles relate to system profile, local service and network service. Any suggestions what I could try to resolve the problem? Many thanks in advance!
To get to the registry editor, go to Start->Run (or Windows key + R) and type “regedit”.
I don’t know what to tell you if you only have one account…
What if you do not have a different profile to log in with? My wife somehow caused this problem on my daughters laptop and she only had the one profile set up. If I can get logged in, how do I get to the registry editor?
Cool! But it was still happening after a clean reboot for me… (First thing I tried.)
This happened to me too, but rebooting and deleting the stored hibernated session that I had fixed it (if I’m remembering correctly)