Microsoft just has a certain way with words.

First it was windows 2000: based on NT Technology.

Since NT stands for “new technology”, they were actually saying: based on new technology technology.

Well, here is another example:

Vista laptop with a mucked-up (or forgotten) password.

Easily cleared to a blank password… But when I click to login as the user, I get:

The user profile service service failed the logon. User profile cannot be loaded.

Should someone tell microsoft that using the word “service” as part of the name of a service is not a good idea… Nah, they probably won’t listen anyway.

So, to fix this corrupted user profile service service 🙂 :

• F8 to start in safe mode
• login as Administrator
• At this point, you can try a system resore… or:
• run regedit
• go to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftWindows NTCurrentVersionProfileList
• make a backup copy of all the profiles
• Make sure the user profile doesn’t end in “.bad” or “.bak”. Rename if required.
• Make sure the RefCount value is 0 (zero). Rename if required.
• Make sure the State value is 0 (zero). Rename if required.
• close regedit and start normally

And after all that, to top it all off, the CD drive wasn’t detected by Vista… deleting upperfilters and lowerfilters quickly fixed that.