Dance like no one's watching

Wanted to use my laptop to check my credit card statements and Windows wouldn’t load after I keyed in the password!  Tried a few times, rebooted, used face recognition to log-in but everything failed!  The error message was:

User Profile Service Failed The Login

Yikes!  No idea what that was.  Win 7 has been pretty stable and my Lenovo laptop hasn’t given me much problems to date.  My husband said his colleague had this error previously and the laptop was taken to IT – and could be fixed.

So I did as he suggested – turned to the almighty Google.  Found a very useful site (https://kb.wisc.edu/helpdesk/page.php?id=15318) to resolve this error:

1. Boot into safe mode
2. Click on the start button, and type “regedit” into the search bar.
3. Hit enter to open regedit.
4. Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList
5. You’ll see two “S-1-5….” folders with long names. One of them will end in “.bak”
6. Rename the one that does not end in “.bak” to “(long string of numbers).bad” or “.old”
7. Remove the “.bak” from the other one.
   • With this folder selected, double click RefCount and type 0 and then click OK.
   • With this folder selected, double click State and type 0 and then click OK.
8. Reboot the machine, and it should be fixed.

It worked.  Phew!

I may not be in IT but I can solve my own IT problems.  Yay!  Heehee.