2 year old + Keyboard + mouse + 10 minutes alone = I NEED HELP

HELP!!

Ok, so my 2 year old Neice managed to access my Mother's computer which I built for her. Within about 10 minutes, she had completely screwed something up. Here is the basic problem, when the computer reboots, it only loads the default profile, and anything that is changed (settings, desktop, email, internet history) is lost next time the system is rebooted.

I get the following error message when Windows is loading (Windows XP Professional):

"Windows cannot load the locally stored profile. Possible causes of this error include insufficient security rights or a corrupt local profile.

DETAIL - An I/O operation initiated by the registry failed urecoverably. The registry could not read in, or write out, or flush, one of the files that contain the system's image of the registy"

So it sounds like it may be a registry error (which scares me, because I frequently use "regedit" from the RUN box so it is already typed in when you bring up RUN, and my neice could have easily pulled that up) Any suggestions on how to fix this?

I did double check, and all her files are still there under "C:\Documents and Settings\Lou\*.*" So I know it is not a matter of deleted files.

her computer info:

Athlon XP 1800
256m Ram
Windows XP Professional
20GB Maxtor hard drive
10GB Western Digital Drive
and lots of other stuff that shouldn't be significant

Thank you so much in advance!! MeanGT

 

do you have any restore points made?

 

To be honest, I am not sure, I tried selecting "Last known good configuration that works" after hitting F8 on bootup, and that didn't work. How would I check if I have a restore point made?

 

open up help and support center, there will be a link to the system restore on the right.

Click on it and choose restore from... if you have no points made, nothing will show.

 

Well, I had a restore point, and restored it to a couple days before this happened, and it still does the same thing Any other suggestions?

 

Make a new account and see if works..

 

Thanks for all your help Kodo, I think I somewhat solved the problem.

I created a new account, and it still gave me the error message, so I started looking through the files in c:\documents and settings\ and looked at each individual's folders in an attempt to find a difference or missing file.

I noticed that in the new account I created, the NTUSER file was only 768k in size, but while in the old account, the NTUSER file was over 4 megs!. I opened both of them with Notepad and saw lots of data in the 768k file, but the 4 meg file was completely empty!. So I just made a backup of the 4 meg one, and copied the NTUSER from the new account, and put it into the old account folder, and voila! almost everything was restored.

I did have to change a few things (copy the outlook express files to the new user's directory, etc..) , but so far it seems to be working. The only thing I can figure, is that my neice managed to drag some file, and drop it on top of the NTUSER file??? It is the only thing I can think of.

Thanks again