Is this safe?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Quandon
  • Start date Start date
Q

Quandon

I'm having some major problems which include the system taking a minute "loading
your personal settings" (not the end of the world in itself, but it started at
exactly the same time as others, including the task bar locking up {temporarily}
from time to time). If I'm prepared to lose these settings, is it safe to copy
an ntuser.dat file from a freshly created account of similar type over the top
of the one in my account?

Quandon
 
I'm having some major problems which include the system taking a minute "loading
your personal settings" (not the end of the world in itself, but it started at
exactly the same time as others, including the task bar locking up {temporarily}
from time to time). If I'm prepared to lose these settings, is it safe to copy
an ntuser.dat file from a freshly created account of similar type over the top
of the one in my account?

Quandon
Click to expand...

Quandon,

I personally have used the technique you're describing to recover from
corrupted profiles, and that does work (with the exception of loss of
critical settings, so you backup your favorites and other stuff
first).

This works best from a domain environment, where you delete the domain
profile, delete the local profile on a workstation, then login to that
workstation. This rebuilds your personal profile from the default
profile on that workstation, and when you logoff, it writes your new
default profile back to the domain.

Doing this, in a workgroup environment, requires that you login to the
workstation as an administrator, and copy a default user.dat file to
the profile in question on the workstation.

But before trying something so extreme (and possbily not effective),
why not try to determine what the actual problem is? There's a lot of
spyware out there that could cause this situation. Simply wiping your
profile won't eliminate spyware, and the problem will come back.

Get HijackThis <http://mjc1.com/mirror/hjt/> and Spybot S&D
<http://security.kolla.de/index.php?lang=en&page=download>.
1) Install and run Spybot. Trust Spybot, and accept all
recommendations.
2) Install and run HijackThis. Do NOT make any changes immediately.
3) Have your HJT log interpreted by experts at one or more of the
following forums:
http://forums.tomcoyote.org/
http://63.247.79.145/~coyote/forums/index.php?act=idx
<http://www.wilderssecurity.com/index.php?board=17>
<http://forums.net-integration.net/index.php?s=8a1e9d7c1978cff54ca06a3210c7c1b0&showforum=32>
<http://www.spywareinfo.com/forums/index.php?s=68ddc23721b063d5411ece09e5ac93f9&showforum=11>
(The latter may or may not respond for you as I have read reports that
the SWI site is currently under DOS attack). All of these forums
appear to be rather busy right now, so be patient.

Cheers,
Chuck
Paranoia comes from experience - and is not necessarily a bad thing.
 
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