Restarting erases files!

I recently reformatted my computer to Windows XP Pro SP2. At first everything was fine, but now I've started having problems. For some reason, everytime I log off or restart/shutoff the computer, all of my settings and documents are erased. Well, nothing is actually erased, but it's moved to the location C:\Documents and Settings\Mitch.OLDCOMP rather than My Documents. And all of my desktop settings (theme, backdrop, screen saver, pointers, etc) are all reset to Windows default. As such, I am forced to always use Standby, which is usually okay cause that's what I use most of the time. However, it also means that each time the computer locks up or has to be restarted due to a software installation, I have to redo everything. Needless to say, it's a PITA, and it really bothers me. Also, everytime the computer logs me on, Notepad opens up and just says something about my shell32.dll file has an error.

In addition, I received my first BSOD today. I brought the comp back from standby, opend firefox and navigated to the forums here, and all of a sudden it popped up. It didn't say anything important, just that the physical memory was being dumped and that the computer would be restarted when I pressed a key. I'm at a loss. I'm wondering if this is due to the uxtheme.dll patch that I used so that I could use unsigned themes, though I've never heard of anyone else having this problem. I'm really afraid I have a serious system problem here. Please help. Thanks.

 

I"m going to move this to software. This is more of a problem of XP. I haven't ran across what causes it or possible solution, but I'll see if i can find anything out.

 

This could be a result of the uxtheme.dll patch. From where did you find and download it?

It could also be related to the Files and Settings Transfer Wizard. That sounds like something that might happen when you transfer between computers.

 

I can't remember where I d/l the uxtheme.dll patch. Originally, I just d/l the patched uxtheme.dll file from softpedia, but I was experiencing some problems so I d/l the actual patch program from somewhere else. That may be the reason that shell32.dll window pops up, but so far that's not affecting anything.

The good news is that it appears to have just been the user profile. I forgot to mention that whenever I logged on at the logon screen, a window popped up that said that the profile could not be found, so a temporary one was being created, and all settings would be lost upon log off. Therefore, I created a new user account, and thus far I have been having no problems. I've logged off several times to make sure, and so far everything is working fine. It could have just been a corrupted user account for some reason. I'll keep you posted.

 

Hmm, I was having the same issue last night, with a message saying profile not found on every log in.
I didn't want to create a new account and lose my original profile, so I ended up fixing it by using regedit and go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList
and changing ProfileImagePath to what it's supposed to be ("%SystemDrive%\Documents and Settings\Administrator" in my case)