Corrupt / Missing Windows Profile

If you think that things are going (relatively) well, they come right back at ya....

This time it's my laptop from work. I used to enjoy my HP NX8220 widescreen laptop. It served its purpose well over the last 3 years. Since it was out of warranty (and noisy), it had to be replaced by a Fujitsu Siemens Lifebook E8310.

Personally, I never liked the Fujitsu Lifebooks. They feel like cheap plastic laptops that might fall apart with every keystroke. Apart from the physical look and feel, there's the 'need' to use hardware which can only be used by installing a gazzilion Fujitsu installers/drivers (on the HP I only needed half the drivers to get a functioning laptop).
The quality of these drivers are questionable. On a default Windows XP Pro SP2 OS with ALL the tools/drivers recommended by Fujitsu the hardware and Windows OS don't seem to get along. Without any reason, the OS seems to hang every once in a while. And lately things have gotten worse....

Last week I booted the OS and logged in. After 5 seconds I got the message that my local profile couldn't be found (YIKES!!!!). You might expect this message when you're a member of a Windows Active Directory domain (which I'm not). After clicking the error away for a couple of time I got a relatively clean desktop (I got seriously worried).

It seems that Windows wasn't able to open/load my profile (probably the NTUSER.DAT file), and created a TEMP account which it used to log me in. So I ended up with an empty profile, with no (immediate) access to my documents or e-mail (since they are stored under the original profile).
A reboot of the system didn't give me the profile error. It just logged me in under the earlier created TEMP profile. So no solution in that.

The first thing I did was trying to solve the problem by moving the NTUSER.DAT file so that Windows might create a new one, or by replacing it with a default NTUSER.DAT profile, but it seemed that ALL the NTUSER.DAT files were locked. Even taking ownership wasn't possible (and, yes, I was a member of the local Administrators group).

After spending a couple of hours on this problem I decided to go back a couple of days by using the System Restore. This worked like a charm (thankfully). So I was able to start working again..... Until yesterday... Same problem, same solution. This time I knew that the system had a proper shutdown last Friday (I hardly use Standby, or Hybernate). Something I wasn't sure of the first time it happened.

No idea if this is hardware or software related, but it's extremely annoying (understatement). So far I verified the system with;

• a couple of (online) virusscanners (found nothing).
• anti spyware/malware software for detecting suspicious content (found nothing).
• software in detecting harddisk and/or memory problems (found nothing).

I also checked the programs I installed over the last couple of weeks, and again, nothing out of the ordinary. No software installments in de week befor the first profile corruption occured.
The only software that was installed were the automatic Windows updates.

Conclusion: Windows Updates in combination with Fujitsu Lifebook laptops suck!!!! (until proven otherwise).