User profile damaged warning- "The system has recovered form serious error"

Trouble:

If you have seen error which says “The system has recovered form serious error” after system restart or log off and logging again, then in most of the cases your user profile in windows

XP might have been damaged.

What does this message means actually?

When you receive this error message, your my documents may be missing, you may have to re-create your settings for Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Internet Explorer.

You have to create a new user profile if your “My Documents” is missing or Microsoft Outlook settings are lost.

Let’s how can you create a new profile when your old profile is damaged.

Fix:

You can solve this problem by creating a new profile after backing up your documents and files from old profile. See this post on instruction to backup your important data.

Follow the procedure given below :

1. First find your documents, take the back up.

Path for your documents is given below:

(assuming C drive is where your OS is installed ).

C:\Documents and Settings\<old user name>\My Documents folder

2. Similarly, you can easily locate your favorites at the following path:

(assuming C drive is where your OS is installed ).

C:\Documents and Settings\<old user name>\Favorites

3. Open Start >> All Programs >> Accessories, select System Tools, now click System Restore.

4. Now select a previous date In the Select a Restore Point dialog box and try restore your system to a certain previous date.

5. After confirming the selection in restoration process, the restoration process starts which will also restart your computer.

6. Log on to your user profile after restart and check your profile folders if they had been restored correctly.

7. If your computer has been restored correctly with user profile folders data not affected, then it means that you have successfully repaired your profile.

But if your profile folders are still not reverted back to original settings, it means your windows user profiles is damaged. So that means you need to follow some additional steps :

8. Log off from the computer, and then log on to the computer by using the default Administrator account, or an account with administrative permissions.
9. Open Start >> Control Panel.

10. Select Performance and Maintenance, click Administrative Tools, and then double-click Computer Management.

11. Make sure you had back up all your profile folders like my documents and favorites as told in step 1,2 and 3. Right-click the damaged user account, and Delete it.

12. Right click on the 2nd right panel, and select New User.

13. Check these options while creating your new user account.

check User must change password at next logon

check User cannot change password

check Password never expires

check Account is disabled

and click OK.

14. Lastly restore or copy all the backed up documents and files to my documents folder and favorites folder.For instructions on restoring your data,see this link.

After following all the steps you have successfully restored your back up profile to the newly created profile.

We hope that the above procedure helps to fix the problem.

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