Another repair install of XP (due to a motherboard failure)

But once windows starts, I get:

Windows cannot load the users profile.
Windows logged you in with the default profile.

And after I’m logged in, I get a few error messages like:

Cannot create a file when that file already exists.

I can already guess that this is a file permission problem with the original user account.

So I restart in safe mode, see that the permissions and owner settings don’t look right. So I change them, and apply the change to the whole c:Programs and Settingsuser folder structure

But after restating in normal mode, things are not quite right… so as the normal user, I start windows explorer, go to c:Programs and Settingsuser, then go to properties, and change ownership of the whole folder structure (again).

After that, I’m still getting errors.

So I figure a restart is worth trying.

Sure enough, after a restart, everything is back to normal.