The User Profile Service failed the logon. User profile cannot be loaded

Another big problem appeared today with Vista. What new? I got the 'The User Profile Service failed the logon. User profile cannot be loaded' error message. What the heck is that? Oh well off online to check for solutions. I couldn't find something that was giving me a definate answer.

As time was getting by i was getting angry. When suddenly i saw something on the account i was trying to log in. It had became 'backup'. Hmmm. Lets go on the registry to see what that meant.

I navigated to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList and I checked the SID for that account. At the end of the string had a '.bak' to it and above it the same SID without the .bak extention. So i deleted the one WITHOUT the .bak and I renamed the one WITH the .bak not to include the extention.

And VOILA the problem was fixed. Hope this helps to anyone with the same problem.

Fixing slow Windows Explorer copy in Vista

OK i thought i had finished with tinkering on vista. I was wrong! More problems arised. 'Great', i thought, 'what else?'. This time the Windows Explorer was freezing up while copying or going through directories on a network drive. I was puzzled? The machine had a 1 Gbit NIC! Switch was 1 Gbit too. What's the problem?

I went through alot of web sites to find out a solution and as i was searching for answers i found 2-3 web sites that were refering to the same problem with different solutions to it.

With alot of trial and error i found out that if i do the following the system became alive again.

1) Disable the autotuning, as per previous entry.
2) Disable indexing on the computer. Not crucial but hey why not?
3) Disable Remote Differential Compression.
To do that go to Control Panel, click Program and Features, click on Turn Windows
features on and off, and untick the Remore Differential Compression checkbox.
4) Open Control panel again, go to Network and Sharing Center, click Manage Network Connections. Right click your Local Area Connection and click Properties. On the new screen that appears click the Configure button under your NIC card. Click Advanced and select Speed & Duplex. By default will say Autonegotiate. Depending on the NIC it will have some values. On mine i selected 100 Mbps Half Dublex.

And that was it. The computer seems a bit speedier to respond but with a drop of actual speed from 1000 Mbps. Oh well. You win some, you lose some.

Enable verbose mode on Vista

OK sometimes you want to see what the heck is going on when Vista is loading up and the 'Please wait' doesn't cut the mustard. Well in that case you can add a registry entry that will show abit more information about the procedures running on the background.

Copy and paste this into a new text file with the extention .reg and double click on it.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System]
"verbosestatus"=dword:00000001

That should add the new entry. One quick reboot and you are done.

TCP Tuning off for Vista

Well sometimes Vista in a network environment misbehave. It has a new function that tries to Auto-Tune the connection. That can cause poor intermittent network performance. So what can we do to turn this option off? Easy. Type:

netsh interface tcp set global rss=disabled
netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled

as an administrator and that was it.

You have new unopened items missing in the taskbar

People asking me all the time about the small yellow envelope, in outlook, that appears in the taskbar when a new email comes in. They keep on loosing it! Where is it? Where did it go?

Relax, it's not that bad. To get it back do the following:
Click Tools
Click Options
Click E-mail Options
Click Advanced E-mail Options
Tick the "Show an envelope icon in the notification area"
Click OK 3 times.

And that's that! Easy.

Vista loses network connection. AGAIN!

Argg!! It happened again. I lost connection to the Internet thanks to a drop of the TCP/IP stack!! I thought that I had fixed this problem so I typed in

Netsh winsock reset

And I though everything would be OK. WRONG! My previous fix didn’t work!! What the heck? After lot of questions and searching I found this command too

Netsh Int IP reset resetlog.txt

Which resets the IP address or something. And in an instance the connection was up and running again. I’m telling you, Vista has A LOT of way to go before it’s a OS that stands out. Wait! Isn’t that what Windows 7 suppose to be? Hmmmmmm!

Chkdsk runs at boot time

And here we are again. I had another problem lately. Something that, again, haven’t seen before. Yes I know, I have LOTS of things not seen before. Why you telling me YOU have seen all of them??

Well, anyways, I had a computer that was constantly doing scandisk at start up. I ran scandisk. Nothing. I ran defrag. Nothing. I downloaded a freeware to scan the disk. Nothing. Oh by the way the program is called Active Hard Disk Monitor from LSoft Technologies Inc. (www.ntfs.com).

I didn’t know what the heck was going on! I read in one webpage that there must be a “dirt” thingy in the drive that causes this problem. “OK”, I said, “let me give a try the following command”.

I opened a command prompt window (with cmd) and typed in “fsutil dirty query d:”, without the brackets, where d: was the drive with the problems. I got an answer that the drive was dirty. “OK”, I said again, “I’ll bring the cleaners to clean it up. No? Won’t work? Something else you say?”.

After erasing that thought from my mind I tried the following command:

chkdsk d: /f /x

It said that the check disk can’t run because the drive can’t be unmounted due to a program using it! What the heck??? Which bloody program? The antivirus was off, no visible activity there! What’s going on?

I remembered then that each drive may have VIRTUAL MEMORY assigned to it. By default only the C drive has, well in mine at least! So I right clicked My Computer, Properties, Advanced, Performance Settings, Advance, Change and voila, the D drive has virtual memory assigned to it. One second after the option for the drive to have virtual memory was unchecked.

Ran the chkdsk command and, you guessed it, no complaints. The procedure ended very quickly. Ran again the fsutil dirty query d: command and the drive was NOT DIRTY ANYMORE! And that was it. Hope this will help you too, o traveler of the weird place called internet.