One for the real techies. Help a whole town!

Biggins

My home town has been having power cuts for two night now.
(I have the best surge protectors possible attached to anything pc/laptop-wise - if ye don't have any, go get one.
For the sake of 20 quid, it can save you A LOT of aggro and your expensive system too)

However friends are not so well off.
Since reboot and having to reinstall drivers for their wireless sticks just to get them working alone, a "Virtualprofile" setting is showing up in the manage networks setting box.
It kicks in from start up EVERY time and this is with having removed it the previous time.
In order to get connected to the internet, one has to delete the "Virtualprofile" every time and then select their own broadband provider.

Does anyone know whats going on and/or how to solve this mad problem?

There is many in the whole town of Drogheda now suffering from this crazy problem.
(Its only started since the power cuts that have no explanation from the ESB yet)

The machines are all running bloody Vista by the way.

Gadgetman496

Sounds like the sudden power failure caused Vista to fail to update the registry as it would do under a normal shutdown.

I wonder if this has any baring on your situation?

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Biggins

gadgetman496 wrote: »

Sounds like the sudden power failure caused Vista to fail to update the registry as it would do under a normal shutdown.

I wonder if this has any baring on your situation?

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Thanks for the suggestion.
Sadly, that article refers to the setting up of Virtualpc, a Microsoft app that only works on Vista enterprise and other higher specs/versions of Vista etc.
Not the standard Vista Home Premium what comes with a home pc.
"Virtual profile" keeps appearing. Where its coming from is unknown to me.
I am sure of one thing. None of the other home users experiencing the problem have "VirtualPC" installed, have no use for it and have never even heard of it.

Gadgetman496

I gathered that they wouldn't all be using virtual machines

It's just that Vista has a built in program for a virtual adapter & I was just wondering if it somehow became active?

Read this

I'm only throwing ideas at you Biggins in the hope you might hit on something.

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Gadgetman496

Whenever a user logs onto a Windows computer, a user profile folder is created for that user Read More....

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Biggins

gadgetman496 wrote: »

Whenever a user logs onto a Windows computer, a user profile folder is created for that user Read More....

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Thanks, will have a look at that in the morning.
Let you know how I get on.

Biggins

Next morning...

Those pages did in deed help.
They pointed me in the right direction.

Apparently when all the computers crashed around the town, Vista in its wisdom made an emergency profile on reboot with settings of its own accord.
Subsequently at startup this would kick in before the normal profile setup with all the usual user accounts detailed in it.

Long story short - for future reference if anyone come across this problem:

• I made a restore point (in case I screw up and I do! )
• Then I deleted the emergency profile that was made (it was clear what one was the emergency one, file size was way smaller than the other on the list)
• Rebooted (took ages but I expected that as settings where being adjusted)
• When pc booted up again, pc was re-forced to use the original profile settings.

All back to normal or at least I though so till two reboots later!

I can't state it enough to folk, if you have 20 Euro to spare - get a surge protector.
It will seriously save you a lot of heartache, worry and money in the long run.

Thanks gadgetman496 for the directional posts. Much appreciated.

calex71

Yeah there was a loud bang where i was on the south side of drogheda on friday evening around 7:30 pm , seemed to be at the marleys lane substation.

Power was back after 45 minutes or so though with no problems on any of my pc's here.

Gadgetman496

Biggins wrote: »

Next morning...

Those pages did in deed help.
They pointed me in the right direction.


All back to normal or at least I though so till two reboots later!


Thanks gadgetman496 for the directional posts. Much appreciated.

What happened two reboots later Biggins?

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Biggins

The virtualprofile reappeared.
Its weird. Totally weird. Appears out of nowhere. I know of three machines now in Drogheda that have this exact same problem.
...and thats just that problem!

Got a laptop also at the moment from a chap that lives on an estate near the now gone Bridgeford,
Its a less than a year old acer. Their machine was effected by the ESB cuts too - wiped the harddrive partitions, even down to the basic sata drivers attached to the BIOS, cpu and motherboard etc.
The windows recovery utility hidden under F8 can't even kick in cos of the damage done to this family's hard drive!

There is a lot of pissed off Drogheda folk out there and they are looking for help.

Gadgetman496

Did you delete the profile using the correct procedure & not by just deleting the folder itself?

"Don't just delete the C:\Documents and Settings\user_name folder for that user as it leaves the registry settings for that profile intact and this can confuse the profile service and cause unpredictable results.

The right way of deleting a user profile is to use the profile applet, which is accessible from the Advanced tab of the System applet in Control Panel. "

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Biggins

gadgetman496 wrote: »

Did you delete the profile using the correct procedure & not by just deleting the folder itself?

"Don't just delete the C:\Documents and Settings\user_name folder for that user as it leaves the registry settings for that profile intact and this can confuse the profile service and cause unpredictable results.

The right way of deleting a user profile is to use the profile applet, which is accessible from the Advanced tab of the System applet in Control Panel. "

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Yea, did it the right way. Still no joy.
I'm searching like mad for days now to find a solution - no joy yet either.

Gadgetman496

Biggins wrote: »

Yea, did it the right way. Still no joy.
I'm searching like mad for days now to find a solution - no joy yet either.

If it's continually finding that phantom virtual profile on reboot it must be getting the Info from somewhere?

The registry would be my first port of call but maybe something in the startup/MSConfig settings is causing it?

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Nehaxak

Could be the original users profiles (or parts(s) of them) have just become corrupt due to the PC's shutting down while the HD's were working away. If the power on state on the computers were set to continue from where they left of after the power outtage, they could just reboot into that state but yet the wireless config might have changed. So the last known working config of their internet connection would not be exactly the same as it was before the power cut, as their router/whatever would've have also powered off and possibly reset itself to defaults or something similiar maybe ? Thereby effecting their connection in Vista under their logon and Vista creating temporary virtual profiles to compensate.

A HD wouldn't be wiped completely from a power cut though, more likely just bad errors created from a HD head crash or something while the HD was reading/writing which might've made the drive unuseable (try it in another computer as a slave drive so at least you might be able to recover something from it?). That is unless it was a lightning strike closeby or electrical explosion of some other sort that also created an EMP pulse. I've seen that happen while I was working in Africa some years back, lightning struck about 200 yards away (everything was unplugged during the storm, including the network and phones) but the pulse given off from the lightning closeby completely wiped some of the cheaper HD's (fujitsu, Maxtor) in some of the machines, whereas those with Western Digitals were uneffected :cool:

Cuddlesworth

I see this in work a lot with Vista, the original profile is corrupted somewhere so its loading a temp profile. It can be intermittent, but it will keep happening. You need to delete and recreate the original profile to allow them to logon without this happening. Rename it to something like Johnold, and set up a new user account. Make sure you have admin access on another account to do this.

Biggins

Thanks for directions to look into.
I will try the above and let ye know how I get on.

Biggins

Nehaxak wrote: »

Could be the original users profiles (or parts(s) of them) have just become corrupt due to the PC's shutting down while the HD's were working away. If the power on state on the computers were set to continue from where they left of after the power outtage, they could just reboot into that state but yet the wireless config might have changed. So the last known working config of their internet connection would not be exactly the same as it was before the power cut, as their router/whatever would've have also powered off and possibly reset itself to defaults or something similiar maybe ? Thereby effecting their connection in Vista under their logon and Vista creating temporary virtual profiles to compensate.

Cuddlesworth wrote: »

I see this in work a lot with Vista, the original profile is corrupted somewhere so its loading a temp profile. It can be intermittent, but it will keep happening. You need to delete and recreate the original profile to allow them to logon without this happening. Rename it to something like Johnold, and set up a new user account. Make sure you have admin access on another account to do this.

Tried the above and still no joy. Virtual profile still appears - even with a new account and created admin' rights new name set-up.
This one has me stumped and not just me!
Usually I can solve most windows problems but this one has me!

Cuddlesworth

Can you post a screen shot of this "Virtual" network connection?

Nehaxak

Biggins, have a look here, see if this helps at all or gives any guidance as to what is going on...

http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/information-technology/vista-user-profile-service-error/

http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/130095-user-profile-service-failed-logon-user-profile-cannot-loaded.html