Your Profile was not loaded correctly error on windows 7

I’ve had a few instances lately where corrupt profiles have prevented me from logging into with a Windows 7 or Server 2008 R2 machine. At the time of logon, the logon process takes a while and then I get the following error:

Your user profile was not loaded correctly. You have been logged on with a temporary profile. Changes you make to this profile will be lost when you log off. Please see event log for details or contact your administrator.

Also in the Event Viewer (Application) you have an entry for Event ID 1511. Normally this isn’t a big deal because you can log onto the machine with a different admin account and delete the problem profile. Only in this case when you go to remove the profile it doesn’t exist. I came across the following Microsoft article – KB947242 that deals with this issue. If you open regedit and Navigate to:

HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfielList

You will find a list of profiles that are identified by their SID. Locate the SID of the account in question (It will probably be called SID.bak) and delete the entry. Log off of the system and log back in using the problem account.

Windows 7 & Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 released for public consumption

Today Microsoft made available Service Pack 1 for Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 via its Windows Update and download center sites. SP1 includes the new RemoteFX feature which delivers Direct3D acceleration and on the server side SP1 includes Dynamic Memory. This essentially allows on-the-fly adjustment of memory allocation for virtual machines being hosted on Hyper-V.

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-CA/windows/downloads/service-packs

Windows Update Error Code 80072F8F

From time to time patch installations will fail during our OS deployment process leaving the workstation not fully patched. Once a machine has finished imaging someone from the deployment group will usually do a spot check and connect to Windows Update just to ensure that the workstation is fully patched. Last week I started to notice that many of the new Windows 7 workstations would not connect to Windows Update and get the following error:

An error occurred while checking for new updates for your computer.
Error(s) found:
Code 80072F8F

Checking online I found a Microsoft article that explained that this error usually results from a time mismatch between your machine and the Windows Update servers. However, these workstations were members of our domain and all of the time settings were correct. I found another post referencing root cert problems and the Windows Update error 80072F8F which reminded me of my post about Windows 7 failing to update its root certificates and causing Windows Live Messenger sign-in to fail. After updating to the latest root certificates (KB931125) Windows Update connected just fine.

Office 2010 and the Dell OMCI client

When I first started to deploy Windows 7 using ConfigMgr our task sequence included Office 2010 Professional Plus. Early on I noticed that during the deployment Office 2010 would never get installed yet all other application were. All of my image development is done using Hyper-V (which worked without issue) and this only occurred on physical machines. After going over countless ConfigMgr logs, recreating task sequences and internet searches I found a random post mentioning that the Dell OMCI client changes permissions on two folders:

C:\Windows\System32\winevt
C:\Windows\System32\winevt\Logs

The permission change on these two folders can also prevent Office 2010 from installing. Once I moved the Dell OMCI install to the end of the task sequence so that it installed after Office 2010 I had no issues.

Windows Live Messenger fails to sign-in from a Windows 7 machine

As I have been rolling out Windows 7 test machines in my organization I have noticed that once in a while Windows Live Messenger would refuse to sign-in. If you were to use the same account on a Windows XP machine or another Windows 7 machine it would sign-in without issue. The majority of our applications have been packaged and pushed via SMS so the install is consistent on all workstations. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason why Messenger would refuse to sign-in from some Windows 7 workstations. After much searching we found a blog post (http://dreamlayers.blogspot.com/2009/12/windows-7-cant-always-automatically.html) about an issue with Windows 7 and root certificates. It seems that some Windows 7 machines fail to update their root certificate automatically which in turn can cause Windows Messenger to fail when you try and sign-in. To resolve this issue download and install the latest root certificate update from Microsoft. (http://download.windowsupdate.com/msdownload/update/v3/static/trustedr/en/rootsupd.exe) After the update Messenger shouldn’t have any issues signing in.

Windows 7 SP1

Rumours are starting to surface about Microsoft dropping Service Pack 1 for Windows 7 in Q4 2010. Microsoft won’t confirm these reports but they do have a pretty well established product lifecycle for Windows. It took them just 14 months to release Service Pack 1 for Vista so a Q4 2010 Windows 7 Service Pack 1 release seems to be a probable timeframe. Granted Windows 7 has had strong adoption rate numbers but many corporations out there will wait until SP1 is released to start their migration activities. So SP1 may be less about major fixes or performance boosts and more about selling the corporate customer on Windows 7.

First Impressions of Windows 7

Much of my time is spent dealing with client technologies which will impact the end user experience. So for many months now I’ve been playing on and off with Microsoft’s new edition to the Windows family – Windows 7. I’ll be honest I didn’t spend much time with the Beta or RC releases, in fact it mostly consisted of loading them into a VM and never really doing a deep dive. However I have been doing a fair amount of reading and following the Windows 7 team blog so I’ve kept up to date. Well about a month ago I got my hands on the RTM version and the first thing I did was replace my Vista admin workstation at work with a Windows 7 load. (Note Virtual PC users if your physical machine supports hardware virtualization enable it because it will make a world of difference with the performance of your Windows 7 VM) All I can say is I love it. Vista and I never clicked but it’s been love at first sight with Windows 7. One of features that I find the most convenient is Jump Lists. A Jump List keeps track of the documents, URLs, media files, Explorer locations, etc that you frequently visit and displays shortcuts to them in organized lists located on your taskbar. You can take Jump Lists even further and create custom ones display things such as commonly used programs. I found a great little utility (Jumplist – Launcher (http://en.www.ali.dj/jumplist-launcher) for creating custom Jump Lists and within minutes I had all of my admin tools displayed in a Jump List – very handy.