This Christmas was the quietest Christmas I have had in years in terms of the obligatory “if you have got the time” IT jobs as I only had 1 request for fixing a computer this year (instead of the 4 computers and a DVD player I had a few years back… all requested within 2 hours of arriving home).
Luckily this one turned out to be relatively simple and only took 5 minutes to fix although when I first heard about it I thought it was going to take a few hours. My aunt and uncle reported a problem with logging into their laptop (running Windows Vista Home Premium) on my uncle’s profile where it would give an error message “The User Profile Service failed the logon”, after which it would simply return them to the profile selection screen.
I did a quick search using Safari on my iPhone and the first result which came up for “The User Profile Service failed the logon” sorted out my problem.
Seemingly the cause of the problem was that the profile had managed to enter a backup state and a registry amendment was needed to resolve the issue. The registry amendment to fix my uncle’s issues with “The User Profile Service failed the logon” was as follows:-
- Log in to Windows using an alternative profile
- Open regedit and go to HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList\
- Within the ProfileList key you should see 2 keys with almost identical names except one will have a suffix of .bak (i.e. S-1-5-21-1209794152-539799901-2903691368-1010 and S-1-5-21-1209794152-539799901-2903691368-1010.bak)
- Delete the key WITHOUT the “.bak” suffix
- Rename the other key and remove the “.bak” suffix
- Edit the “State” DWORD within the renamed key and set to “0″ (zero)
After that we were able to restart the computer and log back in under my uncle’s profile without any more problems and no more “The User Profile Service failed the logon” messages.
Sources
TechArena Community – The User Profile Service failed the logon
