Change Name of User Profile Folder in Windows 10  

Brink said:

Hello, and welcome to Ten Forums.

Restoring the original name of the profile folder should sort this for you.

I changed everything back, now when clicking on the old profile its stuck "Preparing windows"

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After trying to open task manager it said "We cant login to your account" and made me sign out

Brink said:

It sounds like something may have gone wrong, and it was loading a temp profile.

If so, try the tutorial below to make sure the original name is still being used in the registry, and the profile folder itself still has the original name.

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

I ended up reseting windows 11, than created a new profile with the name i wanted. Than deleted the other 2 users. Will deleting the original user create any problems?

Brink said:

It shouldn't.

Seems to work alright. Unfortunate that i couldnt get the name change to work.

I'm not sure if this has already been mentioned, but just in case...

I just followed the instructions and indeed they work, but this will break 99.99% of all applications, because most apps don't use expandable variables such as %appdata% and instead use hardcoded paths in the registry and their own personal settings/data/dbs.

The easiest way to work around this issue is, after you rename your user profile folder (step 11) you create a symbolic link to your old profile name.

So, for example, if your old profile was "Brink7" and your new one is "Brink8" you should create a symbolic link named Brink7 and point it to Brink8, so whenever a poorly coded app tries to access your old profile (Brink7) it will be redirected to the new one (Brink8) seamlessly.

You can easily create symlinks (and much more) using the Link Shell Extension.

Create Soft and Hard Symbolic Links in Windows

After following some of this tutorial I ended up giving up and reverting the name back to the old on after about step 8, but now my search bar doesn't work? I've tried multiple different fixes like troubleshooting the search program and running a corruption scan but nothing has worked. I'm worried that I'm going to have to reset my windows to fix it but I really don't want to. The only mistake I made while following everything was signing into a different user so that could be the problem.