only one user?

Thanks for advice. Followed most of it to get grandson back on. A friend has looked at it and says previous settings still there and not deleted. After setting new user it took 5 attempts to delete old settings,still its working alright now. Thanks again..

RAYT
September 2011

By "nothing else", do you mean that you don't have any desktop icons and the start menu is empty?

Do you have at least the task bar at the bottom or along any edge of the screen?

It may be that the desktop and folders have been deleted by mistake.

In that case, you can recreate and repopulate them.
For the following, you need your acount to have administrator privilege (normaly the default under XP)

Open windows explorer and navigate to the "Documents and Settings" folder.
You have a folder for your profile and another one for the 2 other users, an "All Users", plus up to 3 or 4 others.

All Users contains shortcuts available to every one as well as some settings that affec every users.

You should have a "Default User" folder. It the template used when creating a new profile.

Copy it's content, except the NTUSER.DAT and NTUSER.DAT.LOG files to the problem profiles.
This will reconstruct the basic structure of the user's profiles.

Use the Desktop folder to place desktop shortcuts.
Place other shortcuts in the Start Menu folder and it's sub-folders.
You have complete controll on what items are available for each profile.

The other folders will rebuild themself as they are used.

Make sure that no ordinary profile have administrative rights and make a dedicated admistrator profile that will be used to install applications.
This will greatly reduce the risk of having that problem reocurs.

Electro
September 2011