Yet another plea for computer help -- UPDATE: Waving the white flag

Anyone here have any understanding of Windows Vista (I know, I know)? In a day filled with schpilkes, my laptop decided to take the cake.

It's not logging me in anymore. It keeps telling me my 'user profile did not load correctly' and gives me some temporary log-in from which I can do Sweet FA. The warning message tells me to see the event log, which I cannot find. I know all my stuff is in there because there's still 2.97 GB out of 66 GB of storage space free.

I tried System Restore, but it said there are no restore points. That's bunk because I saw it create a restore point when it downloaded the updates which (I think) caused all this. Tried Startup Repair, too, but it didn't do a thing. When I start it in Safe Mode, which still gives me the same user profile message, the border around the desktop says Build 6001 : Service Pack 1.

Thankfully I was smart enough to burn the majority of my music, pictures, videos, etc. onto DVDs a couple months ago, but I'd really rather not have to just wipe the thing clean and start again. Any suggestions?

 

Re: Yet another plea for computer help

How old is your computer?
I ask because I got a new Dell at the end of December, and when I did a system restore, I had the luxury of doing one from the purchase date (or pretty close to it). It doesn't affect word files and pics -- that I know from experience -- and I've been told it won't erase music unless you put a new music program on the computer.

 

Re: Yet another plea for computer help

Hate to say it, bud, but you might have to rebuild the puppy...

 

Re: Yet another plea for computer help

Fix a corrupted user profile: http://windowshelp.microsoft.com/Windows/en-US/help/769495bf-035c-4764-a538-c9b05c22001e1033.mspx

(Had to do this on my XP laptop recently.)

(Although if you're down to just 3GB free, that might make copying the profile problematic...)

 

Pretty much.

The laptop is a loss and the guy at the HP service center was clueless as to what to do, so I'm going to reinstall Vista and just start over again. Thankfully I was paranoid enough to back up the good stuff, though I'll lose the videos that were sitting on the desktop. The most annoying part is I'm losing all my bookmarks.

If you were starting fresh with a new computer, which programs would be must-haves for you?