User Accounts weirdness in XP Pro

[boomerang]

This is going to be difficult to explain, but here goes.

A friend bought a used laptop. I'll call him Bill.

When starting normally, there are 2 User Accounts, Bill and Guest. Starting in Safe Mode, there are 3. Administrator, Bill and Guest. The Administrator account was passworded, but I fixed that. 😉

OK, so everything looks good, except that doing a right click and Explore on the Start button when started normally reveals that Bill is actually running under an account called Ernie. (The names have been changed to protect the innocent)

By that I mean under Documents and Settings, the tree is expanded and under the Ernie folder Start Menu is highlighted. All the associated folders one sees are there. Desktop, Favorites, etc.

There is a Bill folder, but it is incomplete as there is only a My Documents folder that does contain all of Bill's files.

I'd like to delete the Ernie folder just for housekeeping purposes. I can do this in Safe Mode but am afraid to do so. I don't know what the results will be when booting normally.

What to do, what to do?

 

[bsobel]

Nothing unless you want to deal with moving the profile over. What most likely happened was:

Machine had a Bill account, it was deleted. Created an Earnie account. That Account was later rename to Bill. However the rename doesn't rename th profile so you still see \document and settings\earnie\

Bill

 

[boomerang]

Originally posted by: bsobel
Nothing unless you want to deal with moving the profile over. What most likely happened was:

Machine had a Bill account, it was deleted. Created an Earnie account. That Account was later rename to Bill. However the rename doesn't rename th profile so you still see \document and settings\earnie\

Bill

I understand your reply. Would the correct procedure to move the profile be documented here?

I found this after posting.

 

[bsobel]

Yea, that should work. Best if you do this from the admin account (e.g. not from one of the accounts involved). You can almost just copy the files over since the users registry is in that path as well, but getting all the permissions changed to be standard is usually a PITA so this route (your link) should do most of the grunt work...

 

[boomerang]

Originally posted by: bsobel
Yea, that should work. Best if you do this from the admin account (e.g. not from one of the accounts involved). You can almost just copy the files over since the users registry is in that path as well, but getting all the permissions changed to be standard is usually a PITA so this route (your link) should do most of the grunt work...

Thanks a lot. I appreciate the help.