Why did my PC reset itself?

[Roshen]

Hi!
When I booted up my laptop today, it waited a little bit at the log on screen saying 'Preparing Windows"
When It logged on, My desktop, Personal (User folder) Files, Pre-installed Apps, 3rd party app settings, Explorer (Folder Options) settings, Themes were gone. And disabled services have been re-enabled.
Every other file that are on different partitions,registry edits, and installed fonts are fine.
I'm still going through my PC. I would very much like to know what went wrong.
-Thanks!

P.S.: Windows 8.1 (9600)

 

[jay32267]

Well....there was just a big update for Windows 10....maybe there was one for Windows 8.1.

Many times when you see "Preparing Windows", this is right after a big update.

So....it could be.....that you kind of got screwed by the update.

 

[velocityg4]

Sounds like a corrupt user profile you are loading into a temporary profile. Skip to the steps in the link to repair your user profile for your version of Windows. Don't worry about the error message example in the link. The corrupt profiles show up in many different ways. The fix is usually the same.

https://neosmart.net/wiki/corrupt-user-profile/#Cause_2_File_system_integrity_compromised

Here are some more options.
https://windowsreport.com/corrupt-user-profile-windows-10/

 

[Roshen]

Well....there was just a big update for Windows 10....maybe there was one for Windows 8.1.

Many times when you see "Preparing Windows", this is right after a big update.

So....it could be.....that you kind of got screwed by the update.

Haha.. I know.. Windows Updates are a lot aggressive these days.
But it was not an Update. I've disabled Update service.
And it happened today as well. Only after a shut down followed by a boot up.
I'm gonna keep looking. Thanks for the reply!

 

[Roshen]

Sounds like a corrupt user profile you are loading into a temporary profile. Skip to the steps in the link to repair your user profile for your version of Windows. Don't worry about the error message example in the link. The corrupt profiles show up in many different ways. The fix is usually the same.

https://neosmart.net/wiki/corrupt-user-profile/#Cause_2_File_system_integrity_compromised

Here are some more options.
https://windowsreport.com/corrupt-user-profile-windows-10/

Ah.. Thanks!
The registry thing worked. Only, I didn't do exactly what it said.
When I opened
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList
In one of the long sub keys that had ".bak" in the end, I noticed there were my username in "ProfileImagePath".And also in the other long sub key (that didn't have ".bak", the "ProfileImagePath" value was C:\Users\Temp".
So I renamed and removed the ".bak" and deleted the one without .bak.
Now I'm back to normal.
Again, Thanks!

 

[velocityg4]

Glad to help.