Fix You've been signed in with a temporary profile in Windows 10  

Brink said:

Candy,

You should be looking for the SID key under the ProfileList key located below instead.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList

The issue I'm having is that I am unable to find the profile list key. This is all that I see. I have looked under all the tabs but cant see what I'm meant to see.

Thanks so much for taking the time to write up this post with all the detailed information. I was bitten by this problem following a recent upgrade to 1903. I followed your instructions and it worked perfectly. I was blown away to login after the last restart and see my desktop perfectly restored to the way it had been before.

My only concern is that there is some problem lurking out there that is going to come back again and cause problems in the future (like on the next upgrade). Does anyone know what the underlying problem might be that would cause Windows to switch to the temporary profile??

Brink said:

Hello psfales, and welcome to Ten Forums.

I'm glad the tutorial was able to help you.

This usually happens when something changes the name or path of your account's profile folder either in the registry or the folder itself and not both, leaving Windows not able to find your profile folder and assigning a temp profile.

The problem is, it's hard to know exactly what did this since almost anything could. Bad update, corruption, some program, malware, user error, etc...

It's still a mystery I guess. This is a system which mostly sits in a corner running an embedded application, and there are are no users other than me. When I fixed up the registry keys, I did not have to make any changes to folder name in the registry or the folder name itself - that was all correct. All I did was rename the .bak entry to replace the deleted one (without the .bak). For now, I'll just chalk it up to one of those things you suggest, like "bad udpate."

Thanks again.

So quick back story: This is my lab/research machine. Playing around with a script I forgot what account I was in. The script deletes and then creates, which is what I did to the account I was in. Until I noticed that 'Windows' specific functions, like start, would not work I was oblivious. Restarted it came right back but in to the default Admin user(which I always have enabled, bad I know). Checked the 'User' folder and I had a new one to go along with my old one.

After some tinkering to get everything back to the way it was, I think I have done it only to be met with the temporary account message. I followed the tutorial using step 12. Everything should be set. Then I had to get greedy. I wanted all of my old 'stuff' back. So I copied from the old user folder, 'me', to the new user folder, 'me.new'. I didn't copy the ntuser.dat file, but did copy the appdata folder. Again, being greedy, I decide to delete(after making a backup) the 'me' user folder, rename 'me.new' to 'me', and change the PIP accordingly. I restart, login to 'me'...I see my background and desktop apps, I wasn't greedy.

Wrong. Back to where I started, the 'Start' button doesn't work, no file explorer. Trying to open file explorer in cmd, powershell, win-r gets a message about not having permission to access. Sure enough, checked the ACL on C:\Windows and it says I don't have permissions. I can open anything in the programs or programs(x86) folder, or anywhere else so far.

Back in 'Admin' I see something I didn't see an extra reg sub key, 'Preference'. Checked C:\Windows permissions again and get a different story.


Where did I mess up?

BTW: This is Win10 Enterprise LTSB 2016 Edition.

I tried that. This has been going on for 3 days and I have spent a lot of time on it, so details from the beginning may be a bit hazy.

The script used 'net user' to add and delete. I added 'me'(thinking I was doing it for the first time), then deleted 'me' and then added 'me' right back. So when I restarted, the list of users at sign in and in settings didn't change. The only change was a new user folder labeled 'me.new' and a new SID in the registry pointing to that new user folder. Since the original 'me' user folder was still intact, I did try changing the PIP values for each SID so that the newly created SID would point to the original 'me' user folder. When I tried to login that way, it started to sign in and then signed right back out. Never left the lock screen.

And the adding, deleting, adding of 'me' I did, left Windows with an 'Account Unknown' in the User Profiles windows under System Properties. That 'Account Unknown' was the same size as the original 'me' user folder. I could never find a way to get that restored either. Ended up deleting it. But I did a backup before doing any of this. Had a talk with myself about not doing that earlier, before this all happened.