Profile Problems

Hi,
I booted up the computer as usual this morning, and clicked to enter my profile. The other profile listed under mine disapeared and the usual loading... came on. This took much longer than usual, and after a few mins of no disk activity I reset my pc. When I clicked to log in again, it again took longer than usual, but did load into windows. But the profile was a blank one with no files on the desktop or in my documents, and the theme was back to default. I looked in c:\documents and setting to find my profile I was using before was now called chrisirving.ngmedia~1 my documents and desktop files along with cookies where still present but windows settings along with email messages and address book where missing.
I just checked the event viewer and it said "Windows was unable to load the registry. This is often caused by insufficient memory or insufficient security rights.
DETAIL - The configuration registry database is corrupt. "
and after that "Windows cannot load your profile because it may be corrupted. "
So what has caused this? and can it happen again?
Chris Irving

 

restore

try a system restore from the day before the flubup