Please help -- Windows XP has defaulted to original settings

[RemoSinanju]

Hello,

I'm hoping there is an easy answer for this. I have a Windows XP and 98 dual boot. I loaded XP and selected my normal user, and everything came up fine. I then loaded up a computer game that locked up during the startup sequence. I couldn't alt-tab or ctrl-alt-delete out of it, so I hit the reset button.

Here's where it gets interesting. XP came back up, showing the two users it always shows. I selected the same user, and it took almost a minute to load up, when it usually takes less than 10 seconds. Also, all of my personal settings are gone. I have the default background, default UI "look and feel", and none of my registered programs operate. I used Outlook Express and Word earlier tonight. However, now XP thinks Outlook Express is being used for the first time because it asks me to set up my mail account. Also, XP doesn't think that Word is installed. It looks like the entire Windows Registry got set back to the default settings. Also, it still takes a long time to boot up.

Does anyone have any insight? I'd really appreciate any help I can get.

Thanks.

 

[RemoSinanju]

This morning I got an error dialog I didn't get last night. When I pick the user that I'm having problems, with, I get one dialog that says something like "Could not load or find your user profile, it may be corrupt. Contact your system administrator". I click OK, then I get another message that says something like "Loading with temporary settings. Any changes you make will be lost when you log out."

Does anyone know if there is a way to fix this problem? I've been using XP for about a month now, and I've already had to nuke the partition and reinstall from scratch once. If I have to do this again, I think I may put another OS on instead.

Thanks for the help.