work laptop booted to blank desktop--is something seriously wrong

[frozentundra123456]

Hi all,

Hope someone can give me some ideas about a weird problem with my work laptop. It is less than a year old Dell, Win 7, dual core SB i5, 8gb ram.

Anyway, it has been working well. I use it for Office programs and a special chromatography data analysis program.

In any case, last time I logged in, instead of booting to my normal desktop, it said "configuring your desktop" like it did the first time I set up my account with the IT person. When it finished booting, it went to a blank desktop with only a "My Computer" icon.

After the panic subsided, I shut down and rebooted, and my normal desktop came back and all the programs worked properly. Could this be a problem with the hard drive or some other physical component, or was it more likely just a software glitch? I am very concerned, as the networked drive is backed up of course, but the HPLC analytical data is stored on the C drive which I have to back up manually, and has not been done for a while. Obviously I will do this ASAP though. The drive is also encrypted, so if I cannot log in, it will be very difficult to recover the data.

Thanks for any ideas about what happened or could be going wrong.

 

[Bubbaleone]

Sounds like your user profile may have been corrupted and Windows recovered it. Check the Users folder in Explorer and see if there's an account you don't recognize. If your account, Administrator, All Users, Default, Default User, and Public are the only accounts then that's likely what happened.

 

[Matt1970]

Welcome to windows.

 

[corkyg]

You might give this a shot . . .

http://social.technet.microsoft.com.../thread/bea47202-d869-4155-8c8f-2a5b8bd7be1d/

 

[frozentundra123456]

Sounds like your user profile may have been corrupted and Windows recovered it. Check the Users folder in Explorer and see if there's an account you don't recognize. If your account, Administrator, All Users, Default, Default User, and Public are the only accounts then that's likely what happened.

This is sort of what I assumed. Odd thing was that it didn't give me some kind of error and booted to a new desktop.

So far it has been working again. I think it installed a bunch of updates just before the problem occurred. Maybe they borked it somehow.