"You've Been Signed In With a Temporary Profile"? Fix the ProfileList Entry

You sign in and Windows warns: “You’ve been signed in with a temporary profile” (or “The User Profile Service failed the sign-in”). Your desktop is empty, your documents seem gone, and anything you change is wiped when you log off.

Don’t panic — your files are still there. Windows just couldn’t load your real profile, so it gave you a throwaway one. The cause is almost always a damaged entry in the ProfileList registry key — often a duplicate where your profile’s SID is listed twice, once normally and once ending in .bak. Fix that entry and your profile comes back. (Making a brand-new account is the last resort, not the first.)

Stay signed in to this temporary session while you edit the registry — don’t sign out, or you’ll lose any changes. Export/back up the key first (right-click the key → Export).

Fix 1: Repair the ProfileList entry

1. Win + R → regedit → go to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList
2. Click through the long SID subkeys (e.g. S-1-5-21-…) and check each one’s ProfileImagePath on the right — find the one that points to your folder, C:\Users\<you>.
3. If that SID appears twice — once normally and once with .bak on the end:
   • Delete the key without .bak.
   • Rename the .bak key, removing the .bak so the name matches.
4. With the (now single) SID selected, confirm on the right:
   • ProfileImagePath = the correct C:\Users\<you> path.
   • State (DWORD) = 0.
   • RefCount (DWORD), if present, = 0.
5. Close regedit and reboot. You should sign back into your real profile.

(If your SID has only a .bak version and no plain one, just rename it to drop the .bak, then check the values in step 4.)

Fix 2: Run SFC if it still won’t load

A corrupt system file can keep the User Profile Service from working. In an admin Command Prompt:

sfc /scannow

Reboot and try again.

Fix 3: Last resort — new profile, copy data across

If the entry can’t be repaired, create a fresh account, sign into it once to build its profile, then copy your files from the old C:\Users\<old-name> folder (Documents, Desktop, Pictures, etc.) into the new profile. Your data was never lost — it’s sitting in the old folder.

FAQ

Are my files actually gone? No. They’re still in C:\Users\<your-name>. The temporary profile just isn’t pointing at them. Fix 1 reconnects you; Fix 3 copies them to a new profile if needed.

This happened right after I deleted another account. Deleting a C:\Users folder by hand leaves an orphaned ProfileList entry that can trigger this. See the clean way to remove accounts in Delete a Windows user account.

It comes back every reboot. The State/RefCount values aren’t 0, or there’s still a duplicate .bak. Recheck step 4, or the profile is corrupt — use Fix 3.

Sources: Microsoft Learn — Scripts to clean up profile folder information and prevent temp user profiles