XP can't find profile on start-up

This is happening on two of the laptops in my network. On start-up, windows xp (sp3) says it can't find the user profile and will load a temporary file instead. Our solution has been to start up again. But one of the computers is needing to be restarted a lot of the time. We always get the profile up the second time. Does anyone know why this is happening and how we can resolve it before we lose the profile (which, as everyone knows, is a mess.) I know we could get it back with system restore, but it doesn't happen all the time. So it is easier to restart than to do a system restore. Wha happening?

Thanks

 

Well, I'm not going to do that unless I have to. I doubt that the user profiles on two computers could be getting corrupted at the same time. I think it's one of the windows updates. But we'll see. Creating a new profile is a nightmare when one of the users has outlook express as a mail client. I'm just going to keep on restarting it until it doesn't start.

 

Thanks ... I printed out that thread. I will try all the suggestions when it happens again.

 

You're right. It's more likely that its Malware infection related
You may want to have one of the computers checked in the Malware and Virus Removal forum.

 

I run virus checkers all the time ... but sometimes I run four or five in a row, just to be safe. I haven't been able to find any recently ... but who knows. Thanks. I'll do a series of checks.