I had an odd problem after rebooting one of my work computers yesterday. When I went to log in, it said that it couldn’t load the local profile, that it could be lost or corrupt, and created a temporary profile for me to log into instead.
All of my usual files were there in my profile directory, so it wasn’t because I’d lost some critical files. I rebooted a couple of times in case it was a temporary thing, but it continued to happen. I also booted into safe mode and could log in just fine there, so the files weren’t corrupt either. After poking around the logs a bit, the cause of the error seemed to be that the profile files were in use when it went to try and load them. A bit of googling revealed that this is a common problem when using migrated profiles, but that wasn’t the case here.
But, then I realized that a virus scan was being kicked off when the system booted, since one hadn’t been run in a while, and one of the first sets of directories it scans is…the user profiles. Symantec AV was probably scanning my profile directories at the time I was trying to log in and causing sharing conflicts on the files.
After rebooting again, I waited five minutes before trying to log in, and everything worked fine once more.