profile gone what would cause this

I've seen this a couple times before with xp and I still havent found an answer as to why. Client told me that when he would log in with his password it would bring him momemtarily to the desktop and then would kick him right back out to the login prompt. In and out immediately. I now have his hard drive slaved on one of my machines and what I find is that the profile and all folders under the profile are gone - history. All other profiles are there i.e. admin, default, owner but nothing for the user.

Client told me the only thing he did that was different was he left the machine on over night. He has dsl but also was using sygate personal firewall and when he got up in the morning he couldnt get back in.

Anyone have any ideas what could have caused this ???????

 

Any signs that a chkdsk was run?

When you say "all files" are you including My Documents and the other 'My whatever' folders?

 

newt

everything - my documents, local settings, application data, everything. all thats left is just his name and no + sign to open up the folder. chkdsk verified all okay. all other profiles are okay.

 

I was thinking the removal might have been done by a chkdsk run where it found problems and went a little overboard removing them. I haven't seen it first hand but have read several places where it has happened to others.

Maybe some event log entry that has specifics of an earlier chkdsk run?

Maybe a 'stupid user trick' that the user doesn't want to admit?

Otherwise I'm as baffled as you are.

 

newt

got me confused also. also found that the machine is missing half of the installed programs. missing the top half of the alphabet in the program folder which again is really strange. rebuilt the machine and had no problems. ran diags and they came back just fine. guess now the client has a clean machine he can cludder up again. this time though he has spybot, ad-aware, spywareblaster, avast and sygate firewall so hopefully these things will help protect his system better this time.

thanks newt.