Hello everyone, thank you for taking a look at my post. To start off, I am running Windows 7 Ultimate. I've scoured forum after forum, Google, you name it, and I just have found no working or viable option. After all of the attempts on solutions I've studied, I feel my situation is unique. The state I am in right now, is that I have a hard disk (IDE) with two partitions, one Windows 7 Ultimate, another with Vista Ultimate, both in dual boot. I am currently here posting via a backup SATA drive in case of emergency that I just installed Windows 7 Ultimate on to fresh. I can boot the dual boot drive just fine, but I can't log in to either installation using my profiles: Win 7 - I have a standard user account and an Adminstrator account. When I log into the standard account, "Welcome" appears for a second or two, then blue screens and goes back to the log in screen. No crash, restart or anything, just back to the log in screen. When I log into the Administrator account (which has a custom name and is my primary account, the standard has only been used a handful of times over the last year when it was created) after a few seconds of "Welcome" it changes to "Preparing Your Desktop" and stays like that for up to a few minutes. After it's finished loading, I'm met with sky blue screen which I can CTRL+ALT+DEL to bring up the traditional Windows 7 menu, and/or I can CTRL+Shift+ESC to run the Task Manager. I can open the Run command and start the CMD, and I can also run explorer.exe. CMD does not run in Administration mode when I run it that way. If I run explorer.exe, a Safe Mode like environment appears with two shortcuts and the Recycle Bin on the desktop (which match the two shortcuts in the "Desktop" folder in the "Users/Public" folder on that respective partition, so I believe that is where it may be grabbing data from with this temporary profile). I can't bring the pop-up from the system tray but it mentions that my profile could not be loaded, so a temporary one has been loaded for me, and that I should try again later or contact an Administrator. The Start Menu works, but if I click Computer, a program, open the Recycle Bin, ANYthing at all, it either reports a pop-up error that says Environment (? something that starts with an E if I can recall correctly) Not Supported, or a large series of hypenated numbers in {} brackets. I can type CMD to search and run it that way as well. If I right click on the search result of CMD and click Run As Administrator, it reports the same error. If I search for regedit and click it or run regedit it reports the same error. My only apparent option at this point is to restart the computer or run any non-Administrator-privilege-required command lines. Also, I can boot into Safe Mode and run the CMD AND regedit through the Task Manager, but ONLY if I check the box under the type box in the run window that indicates "run with elevated privileges" or whatever it says, which after some commands proves to be Administrator mode. I also have full control over regedit, which I backed up in case of future changes. Vista - Since I performed the procedures I'm about to mention, my otherwise previously operational installation of Vista has been activated and working more than perfectly fine since about winter/spring of 2009, and used successfully in 3 separate computers (bootable via Startup Repair from the Vista, AND Windows 7 discs). Now, when I type in my password and log in to the account (the only account created, at time of installation; also, no other accounts ever created within Vista) it warns me that I may be a victim of counterfeit and brings me to a limited mode with only 3 options, none of which can be corrected without obtaining a new key (my current one included WITH my purchase of the originally new copy of Windows Vista purchased via Newegg.com reports as invalid). I do not have internet connection on the Vista partition because I just very recently put this dual boot drive in my computer and haven't had a chance to install the LAN drivers for my evga 680i motherboard on the Vista installation, so I can't even access the internet with the browser it gives me when I go to purchase a key online. I can however access my entire filesystem through the browser, so I can do virtually anything from here. I would almost hope that this would happen on my Windows 7 partition so I could at least access the filesystem and an Administrator able CMD and regedit. So, I want to try desparately to fix the problem, and I do strongly believe it can be. I don't really want to perform a new installation of Windows but I CAN, for instance create a new installation that wouldn't overwrite anything else and recover everything that way, but I'm not sure where to go from there if I were to do that. I have tried deleting the SID entry of the main Administrator profile on Windows 7 (which had .bak extended to it), per a guide I found, I believe here on TechNet, along with the "\Users\TEMP" entry with the IDENTICAL SID, but without .bak extended to it, and that caused the "Welcome" to last MUCH longer, and "Preparing Your Desktop" much shorter, but still produced the exact same temporary environment. Finally, to explain how I got to this point, I had been using Paragon Partition Manager 9.0 along with EasyBCD 2.1.2 which have extensive experience with and am very comfortable using, to move around, edit, create and overall just organize all 5 of my hard disks (2 external) to 3 installations of Windows across 3 hard disks. Everything thing was looking great, working really well. My last plan was to in effect (but no by RAID definition) mirror my Windows 7 installation (which was on my primary boot IDE drive) to my completely empty SATA drive, partitioned and formatted. I used the "Copy Drive" option in Partition Manager, and after about an hour and twenty minutes operating in a post-boot, pre-login environment, of what Partition Manager reported to be a successfully completed operation, when it rebooted after I "pressed any key to continue," I was met with the issues listed above. I eventually disconnected all drive except the SATA one with now an identical partition to the IDE with Windows 7 and a separated, empty, unallocated partition, and used my Windows 7 disc to delete and format the entire drive into one partition with a fresh Windows 7 installation, which is where I am now. After my hours and hours of research over the last 48 hours, I'm exhausted physically and mentally and greatly, greatly appreciate any direction at this point. Thank you so much for taking the time to read my long winded explanation! I will be subscribing to this thread if there is such a feature to do so, so as soon as I get the e-mail notification I will respond, as long as I'm not at work. Thank you again!

Bump, just really desperate to find a solution!

When you say 3 different installations of Windows, are you using separate valid licenses for each installation? This is a question that is fundamental in nature, no one will be able to help you if you are attempting to use a single copy of windows in anything more than a single installation. DAS

Hi, Since here is Windows 7 forum, let's focus on Windows 7 issue. It seems your account cannot be loaded properly. Since you can boot in Safe Mode, please take the permission of your user profile. 1. Please show all hidden files, folders, or drives. 2. Then navigate to C:\Users\Yourname folder, you will find NTUSER.DAT 3. Ensure the user has full permission of this file. 4. Open Advanced Security Settings, ensure the user is the owner of this file. If you only can run commands in command prompt window, please try as following: icacls C:\Users\Yourname\ntuser.dat /grant Yourname:F icacls C:\Users\Yourname\ntuser.dat /grant Administrators:F takeown /f C:\Users\Yourname\ntuser.dat /a Or you can use following command to enable built-in administrator account for a test. net user administrator /active:yes Niki Han TechNet Community Support

Hi, Since here is Windows 7 forum, let's focus on Windows 7 issue. It seems your account cannot be loaded properly. Since you can boot in Safe Mode, please take the permission of your user profile. 1. Please show all hidden files, folders, or drives. 2. Then navigate to C:\Users\Yourname folder, you will find NTUSER.DAT 3. Ensure the user has full permission of this file. 4. Open Advanced Security Settings, ensure the user is the owner of this file. If you only can run commands in command prompt window, please try as following: icacls C:\Users\Yourname\ntuser.dat /grant Yourname:F icacls C:\Users\Yourname\ntuser.dat /grant Administrators:F takeown /f C:\Users\Yourname\ntuser.dat /a Or you can use following command to enable built-in administrator account for a test. net user administrator /active:yes Niki Han TechNet Community Support