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For the past 7 months, I've been observing strange behaviour of my Windows 10. For example, upon start, some icons loaded after (cca.) 2 minutes, and if I clicked earlier than that, the screen would freeze, go black and then repeat the process (of slow loading of icons). Major instability has also been a damming factor in the past. After some digging, I found out that it is possible that Malwarebytes corrupted my Windows User Account by scanning upon start. This proposition seems plausible to me, as the people with this problem have described very similar problems.

Two main questions remain:

  1. How do I make sure that a Corrupt User Account is really the problem (in my instance)?
  2. If this is the case, what level of risk/danger (e.g. losing all of my data) does usage of such accounts pose to me?
  3. How can I repair my corrupt account?

BONUS: I know that I can recover all of my data from a corrupt account via tempering with HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList (in that directory, I would delete a path to my account and then proceed to create another - and then copy all of my data), but I'd rather not do that, as it is very sketchy and can cause some serious issues and potentially even data loss (not to mention that I have a ton of programs installed on my current accounts, so I want to keep it at all costs).

Thank you in advance!

God bless
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2 Answers2

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  1. How do I make sure that a Corrupt User Account is really the problem (in my instance)?

Create a new account, copy your data to it and see if it has the same problem.

  1. If this is the case, what level of risk/danger (e.g. losing all of my data) does usage of such accounts pose to me?

I'm unsure what you mean by this, your data won't just 'disappear' because your profile is corrupt, you'd simply find you end up loading into a temporary profile instead however the data will still 'exist' on the disk, and be accessible to a user with the correct permissions. (You'd likely want to access it using an administrator account).

  1. How can I repair my corrupt account?

See the solution to 1, that is - create a new account and move the non-corrupt data across. You technically 'could' try and move everything over, bit by bit until you find exactly what isn't working correctly however I'd estimate you could spend years doing this, and never actually find the cause of the fault, such is the way of windows handling of user accounts and it's system processes.

djsmiley2kStaysInside
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If you suspect MalwareBytes, first uninstall it, if you haven't already done so.
If that doesn't fix your issues it is time to tackle your questions:

  1. Create fresh new account (make it an admin too) as we may need that for step 3. Login with that fresh account and let Windwos create a fresh user-profile. reboot and login with that account again (only then that fresh profile is totally 'ready'). If your problems are gone it was indeed the user-profile. If you still have issues Your Windows itself has a deeper problem. Backup your data and make a fresh install.

  2. You already guessed: Things may degrade further and you loose data (highly unlikely though). But you certainly risk more instability and potentially that instability leading to your entire Windows installation getting corrupted.

  3. You can't. But you can safely retrieve your data. Start working with the fresh account made in step 1. It is an admin so it can access your old user-profile. Simply copy all files/folders you need from the old user-profile to the new one.
    When you completely sure you got all data you can delete the old-profile, but that isn't really needed. You can keep it around just in case as a backup.

PS. In case of Windows 10 you might want to tie the fresh user-account to your Windows Live-ID, if you were using one on the original account.

Tonny
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