User Account Messed up after Upgrade

I was working on a friend's PC yesterday and could not get a windows update to install.This update was a upgrade from v1909 Build 18363.628 to the latest v19041.450.I used the Microsoft Windows 10 Update Assistant to do this upgrade finally after the windows updates failed to install after multiple attempts.

After running the tool it successfully upgraded to the latest v19041.450.Now here is where my problems started.My buddy has 3 User accounts on this windows 10 PC.The first one is his which upgraded fine but the second one is his wife's user account and this one is giving me problems.For some reason now after the upgrade it was taking 4 minutes for all the system tray icons to load completely.Her user account used to fly before the upgrade and now its so slow and a pain in the but to navigate and run things.Shortcut icons on the bottom taskbar turned white and would not work anymore and could not be unpinned.I also ran chkdsk, sfc/scannow,and dism /online /cleanup-image /restorehealth after to no avail with zero results.

The last user account is my buddies kid's account and this one upgraded fine like the first account with no issues.Wondering now as to what route I should take to fix this messed up user account and make it work fine again.Should I back up the stuff on it and then remove it and create a New User account and put her stuff back on it.

If anyone has any ideas on how I should go about fixing this please let me know for I am running out of ideas..Thanks..

Paul Black said:

Hello @NIK1,

I came across these which might be of use . . .

[1] Corrupt User Profile?.
[2] Corrupt User Profile after Windows 10 1909 Update.

I hope this helps!

Thanks for the info you posted to help me fix the user account problem. This is how I fixed the problem a few days ago. I created a new user account and copied backed up files to the new account and all is fine now. One of the repair ideas I tried was to do an upgrade from the media creation tool. It downloaded and made a up to date Win 10 ISO and I ran setup.exe from the user account that was NFG.Once the upgrade was finished and I logged into the account for some reason all the desktop icons for programs that were installed were gone, and desktop folders that were there before were gone also.

I figured this is weird and checked the other two user accounts and they upgraded fine with no loss of program icons or folders that were on each account.I figured to fix this I will just copy the files and folders from the backup I made and all will be fine. Once everything was restored on the NFG user account I logged out and rebooted the computer and signed back in.
Low and behold once the desktop appeared all the stuff that I put back on it was gone again just like I never restored anything.
After this baffling surprise I did another test and created a new desktop folder and changed the desktop background to a different one and signed out and signed right back in and the two things I did were still there but once signed out and reboot is a different story. Rebooting and signing in changes everything back to the desktop I saw right after the upgrade with everything lost again. Even a windows setting like "Select which icons appear on the taskbar" was turned on before the sign-out and reboot and it "reverted back to off" once I logged back in.

So in short order. Nothing saves after a reboot on the "Gremlin account" but I did fix the problem by creating a New user account and copying all the backed-up files to it and "All is Fine Now". To this day I have never seen this before and it baffles the hell out of me to trying to find the Cause for the "File/Folder and Settings Loss after a Sign-out and Reboot". One last point to mention. The screwy user account when I first looked at it took 4min and 25 seconds to get windows to load with all the taskbar icons and "after this point windows would respond normal and fast”. I just can’t figure for the life of me why the upgrade could not fix whatever was screwing it up in the first place especially when the other two user accounts upgraded fine with no side effects at all. OH well at least I had some fun racking my brain in trying to figure it our. It makes me smarter in the long run but I wish I could have found the cause. At least I fixed my Buddies PC and he is a Happy Camper now.