Windows 10: You've Been Logged in with a temporary profile

Hello Justin,

Thank you for posting your concern in Microsoft Community and welcome to the Windows 10 Family.

To be able to assist you better, provide us a few more details on the below questions.

1. How did you upgrade to Windows 10?
2. Did you use a Microsoft Account or a Local Account to access the computer?
3. Did you check with the computer manufacturer if they support Windows 10 drivers for the mentioned make and model of the laptop ?

From, the description of the last update, I understand that the User Profile is corrupt. There is another chance which is a delay in reading your profile files due to Antivirus scan or something else during boot up. Usually after typing your user name and password, Windows tries to read and load your profile, if it gets corrupted or delay in reading, Windows will load with temp profile to give temporary access on the computer.

So if you tried to log on to Windows and received an error message telling you that your user profile might be corrupted, you can try to repair it. You will need to create a new profile, and then copy the files from the existing profile to the new one.

Follow the below steps and check with the results.

Step A. Creating a new user account

1. In the Search Bar type cmd.

2. Now, Right-click on cmd.exe from the result and select Run As Administrator.

3. User Account Control or UAC dialog box will appear, click on Yes.

4. Type net user username password /add

[Replace ‘username’ and ‘password’ with your desired username and password]

Step B. Copying old files to newly created User Profile

1. Go to C:\Users\(Your-Corrupted-Profile-Name)\

2. Copy all files except three files :
NtUser.dat
NtUser.ini
NtUser.log

3. Go to C:\Users\(New-User-Profile-name)\

4. Paste all those copied files here.

Kindly keep us posted with the status of the issue. If it still persists, feel free to write to us and we would be happy to help you.

Thank You.

To be able to assist you better, provide us a few more details on the below questions.

1. How did you upgrade to Windows 10? Microsoft prompted me that my "upgrade" was ready. 
2. Did you use a Microsoft Account or a Local Account to access the computer? A local accoutn
3. Did you check with the computer manufacturer if they support Windows 10 drivers for the mentioned make and model of the laptop ? They are not upgrading some drivers. That still doesn't explain (a) why it worked for the first few weeks and (b) why I can't log on to my local user profile.

Also, your instructions didn't work. I was never given a UAC dialog box. Instead, the cmd.exe application launched.

finally, this is ridiculous. 

I have the same problem. I have two brand new machines with factory-installed Windows 10. On one of them  whenever I shut down (not sleep) and then later power the machine back up again, Windows 10 will do one of two things after I enter my PIN:

1) it goes into a seemingly endless sequence starting with (a) "Preparing Windows" - it does this for perhaps 15 minutes, followed by (b) a totally blue screen with the circular "waiting" indicator saying "Just a moment"; it stays in this mode indefinitely until I forcibly power down.

2) or it logs me in with a temporary profile.

The problem is intermittent. It happens on only one of the two machines, first of all, so it may be hardware related, but otherwise both machines seem to work flawlessly so that seems weird. Also it is more likely to happen when the one machine (the one that fails) has been shut down for several hours. If I power cycle the machine fairly quickly, the problem does not seem to recur. Both of my machines have solid state boot disks so this cannot be a problem with disk "spin up" because nothing is spinning up. Nonetheless I will do some experimentation with maybe waiting longer before I try to log in.

I remember having this same problem with Windows 7 (on another machine) but it lasted only a brief time and I cannot remember what fixed it. It is as though Windows cannot access  your profile just after a restart, due either to some disk failure or some other failure; it is probably some timing thing. I was starting to think maybe my machine has a bad disk, but then I read your complaint here where you upgraded a formerly working machine to Windows 10, suggesting that you are not having disk problems because you are using a machine that formerly worked.

So here we are again. I guess I will comb through the complaints about this same thing in Windows 7 to see if there are answers there. Meanwhile, it is just one of the seemingly endless annoyances of owning complex systems that seem endlessly to have problems.

Syan: Interesting theory you have here but my user profile does not seem to be corrupt, otherwise I would not be able to recover just by restarting or power cycling (read my post above). It seems like there is a temporary inability to access the user profile. My first suspicion would be a disk failure but I have a solid-state boot drive that otherwise performs flawlessly. It could be that I have a bad SSD that takes awhile to get started, but then it seems odd that the machine would boot Windows at all, i.e. if the disk were really failing I probably should not even get a login screen.

And again, I remember having this same problem before on a new machine with Windows 7. Unfortunately I can't remember what fixed it. Maybe the hard disk "broke in" and the problem just went away.

Lame, Lame, Lame.

This works, albeit temporarily.  This happened a month ago.  No fix found so I just used the temporary profile until I found a fix. 

Guess what, it did it again.   Not bad to use a temporary user, however, with no admin rights, it proves useless.  Try to restore, another nightmare. 

I am unhappy with Windows 10 and while I touted is as the bees knees, I wonder if iOS on a MAC is worth every penny.

Problem with this ERROR is that most folks have no idea what to do.  They just freeze and/or panic. 

I have been using computers for 30 years.  I am rather adept in the workings of them.  This issue frustrated me.  I know my way around the inner workings and build them.  If this frustrated me, I can only imagine what the average user encountered.

If this issue is not resolved by my fourth go around, I will be reinstalling Windows 7 until MS can get their issues addressed.

Very unhappy client.

Hello David,

Thank you for writing to us with the updated information and we appreciate your patience on this issue.

From the last description provided, I understand that since you’re on a temporary profile, every file operation you’ll be performing will be nullified at next sign in

Try to follow the below suggested steps and check if it helps to resolve the issue.

1. Press Windows Key + R combination, type put Regedt32.exe in Run dialog box and hit Enter to open the Registry Editor.
   
2. Navigate to the following location:
   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList
   
3. Under the hood of ProfileList key, you’ll find the subkeys specific to a profile, see in the above screenshot.
   For example, I found out myself S-1-5-21-2944774474-1080414133-2956492554-1001. You’ll have these long subkeys equal to the number of user accounts on your system. All you need to do is that make sure the expandable registry string (REG_EXPAND_SZ) named ProfileImagePath in the right pane of these keys exists and linked properly to the correct user account folder. If you find that this is not the case, just point it to correct the location.

Registry disclaimer:

Serious problems might occur if you modify the registry incorrectly. Therefore, make sure that you follow these steps carefully. For added protection, back up the registry before you modify it. Then, you can restore the registry if a problem occurs. For more information about how to back up and restore the registry, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

322756 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/322756/) How to back up and restore the registry in Windows.

Hope it helps this time.

Thank you.

Hello Sonya,

Thank you for writing to us and we appreciate the time and effort you have put in this time.

We also appreciate your support towards our Community members of Windows 10 users. This solution in particular would help people who are facing similar issues in Windows.

Feel free to write to us in future on any issues in Windows operating system and we would be happy to assist you again.

Thank you.

Probably the best approach I can offer you is:

• Turn on your machine and wait for a long time before logging in. Give it a few minutes. Hopefully at some point you will be able to log in with your normal ID, which has (I presume) administrator privileges.
  
• Turn OFF the "fast startup" option using the instructions here, except you do the OPPOSITE of what they say to do at the end, i.e.  you UNCHECK the "fast startup" option.

Good luck. Based on the experience of many others with this problem, you might need it.