XP profile lost or corrupted

I transferred 24 gigs of my mom's pictures from the Mac to the PC for burning to DVD. All went well enough, and the DVD is fine. The PC was getting sluggish so I rebooted and XP said that is could not load my profile and created a new one for me.
This is not a good thing, are there any utilities to fix the old profile?
Is this common? I usually have pretty bad luck, but have not run into this before.

Other Info:
80 Gig RAID
Abit NF7-S MB
Windows XP fresh install 2 weeks ago
SP1 not installed yet
Photoshop, Pagemaker, Final draft, a few games and Office XP installed
Radeon 9700 Pro
System is OC'd. I ran Prime for 48 hours futuremark four times in a row, Sandra burn in overnight and temperatures are nominal.
I am back to the the Mac for a while, strange how a five year old computer is so much more stable than the latest PC.
The Mac is OC'd from 350 to 400.

 

is your old profile folder still visible on the C: drive?

 

Yes, I got XP to install on the old location, have to reinstall all the programs even though they are still here in Program Files.
My old desktop files are still there, but I do not know want to replace without some guidance. I am afraid if I do I will trash something else.

XP is refusing to update right now, IE keeps crashing, I am onMG with Mozilla right now.

 

ok, let see if this profile is listed as an unkown.

right click on my computer and select properties, then advanced tab then settings under the middle section. See if there is a profile that is listed as unknown. if not, then what you can do is log on to a temp admin account and make a back up of your current profile by selecting it and choosing copy to a location. Then just find your profile on the C:\ drive and copy into the folder of the current profile that you wish to overwrite.
Test.. then post back.

 

Thanks for the clear information!
There was no unknown in the profile list.
I made a temp acct and copied the old profile into it. This allowed me to choose the old profile at the windows logon. But it still says that the profile is corrupted. The desktop reverts back to the Windows XP default.

So the original problem has been duplicated. Is there a way to fix the profile or am I rebuilding?

 

When someone calls us about a corrupt profile, we move the data to a new one.


They are considered expendable, and I don't think there is a way to repair them.

 

I concur with adryn .. it may be the that users dat file is corrupted. if there is a way to fix it, I do not know it. Best bet is to copy out the profile documents to the newly created profile with the exception of the NTUSER.DAT file.

 

Thanks for the support. Rebuild and copy is the way I will go. MS's proprietary way of doing things has struck again and I will take the time to resurrect things.
Remember the days of text config and ini files where you could do almost anything to a configuration with notepad? We are rapidly losing control of our own systems.