Change Name of User Profile Folder in Windows 10  

Brink said:

Ah, ok. I was wondering why you were wanting to delete the profile when you posted in the rename profile tutorial

Hey, I am old and I get lost once in a while

Hi again Brink, happy new year.

Returning to this subject after half a year, I'm still deliberating about whether to do it or not, because I'm afraid of doing a mess. I have had nightmares thinking about it.

Because yeah, that solution will change the path/name of the user profile folder, but in Regedit you can see that there are thousands of entries pointing to the original folder name (not with the generic %USERNAME% path, I mean the actual folder name). So, after renaming it, those entries will point wrong, causing a catastrophic disaster.

Obviously, the perfect solution is to fresh reinstall Windows, but that's the last resort.

I just want to change the C:/Users/HelloKitty14 path of my PC without having to reinstall everything again

@Brink thank you for fast response, keep up the good work!

Unfortunately, I still think there will appear problems regarding those Regedits entries

I followed these instructions and successfully changed the name of the folder. When I attempted to go back to my account it wouldn't allow access to the start menu or anything. My desktop background, icons, etc. were wrong. i discovered it created a TEMP user account. I found it in the registry Profile List SID. my SID was still there but had .bak after it. So.. I changed the folder name back. The temporary account dissappeared. My account loaded with all my settings.

My problem now:

OneDrive won't log in. I'm not allowed access to the folder??
Same for Dropbox.
I started to troubleshoot Dropbox first. I uninstalled it and attempted to download the new Dropbox install file. First it failed the download because i selected desktop for the location. I changed the save location to Downloads, I don't have permission. It defaults to documents for the download and I don't have permission for that either.

Brink said:

Hello @hondabones, and welcome to Ten Forums.

It sounds like you may have missed something.

Just to verify, did you already change the OneDrive folder location back to the current name and location of your user profile folder at step 14?

I attempted to but it told me I don't have permission to access that folder.

The fix was: I had to take ownership of all my stuff again. (forgive me, I'm not good at this stuff, that's why I'm using your tutorial) My folders were controlled by 'System'. I changed the control back to me and turned on 'Full Control' etc. Seems to work so far. I also have Administrative capabilities again.

One mistake I made was not signing out of my account prior to logging into the Administrator account. Beyond that, I don't know what went wrong.

Thanks for the response. Sorry I didn't get back to it very fast.

After I successfully changed the user profile and folder, I now have a problem of getting outlook to work again. It is no longer able to find the .ost file. I could not find any way how to change the location.