Windows 10: Change Name of User Profile Folder in Windows 10

John,

"unfortunately there is no easy or otherwise way of changing the user's folder name" - but there is. The procedure in this tutorial does precisely that.

What programs have you found to be inop afterwards? What symptoms did their inop-ness generate?

I have used this procedure and it gave me no problems.

Why did you suddenly throw in a reference to Windows 10? This is TenForums. Everything here is focussed on Windows 10.

Denis

 

Hi Denis,

Glad to hear you didn't mess up your Win 10 installation.

My old Users\<name>\ was "Mercury", I changed it to "JMW".
I searched the registry for "Mercury"

There were:
323 instances of "C:/Users/Mercury/..." in the current User hive
32 in the classes root hive
& 49 in the local machine hive

I think I may have attached a .txt file listing all the above.

Mercury reg entries.txt

Incidentally I still have a C:/Users/Mercury/...

A couple of programs I had to reinstall were Roboform and HD Tune.

I haven't bothered with any others as I'll be doing a fresh install later.

The reason I mentioned Win 10 in the tenforum is because Brink has an also excellent sevenforum.
I didn't know there was two completely separate teams working them.

Most of the registry entries are for onedrive, edge, the microsoft store, and a bunch of other indecipherable references.

Regards,

John

 

A followup question to John W's post: I started to follow the procedure (which is very nicely laid out btw) but stopped precisely because of the same issue, i.e. the existing folder ID is found in hundreds of keys and paths throughout my registry. I don't think it's surprising that some programs will have a problem with that post-change. Which brings me to the question:

wouldn't a solution be to simply search/replace the old folder ID with the new *throughout* the registry? It seems to me that this would take care of any issues but wanted to check if anyone has tried it.

 

Hello dcv, and welcome to Ten Forums. *Smile

Usually, you will only need to change the folder name and folder path for the ProfileImagePath value as in the tutorial since this is what everything references. There may be a few rare exceptions for old programs that do not fully support Windows 10 though.

 

Most of my left over references in the registry were "Most of the registry entries are for onedrive, edge, the microsoft store, and a bunch of other indecipherable references.".

However I think I had gone through procedures to remove onedrive and a number of other customizations to Win 10 prior to changing the user folder name. Which may have something to do with my result.

I would recommend making a good, reliable system image of your C: drive and a system restore of the C: drive before following the file name change process and of course back up the registry key that is changed.

 

Shawn,
Thank you, thank you, thank you! For months I've been trying to get this figured out, and it only took a few minutes when following your tutorial! So informative, & instructions are so clear. Amazing!

 

You're most welcome grooveychick, and welcome to Ten Forums. I'm glad it could help. *Smile

 

Great tutorial. Thanks for that. I have a follow-on newbie question. Let's say that I only need to change the ProfileImagePath for a user, who ended up somehow ended up with two folders under C:\users (let's say user.correct and user.incorrect) and got pointed to the user.incorrect folder. Can I just follow steps 1-9, and simply correct the ProfileImagePath to point to c:\Users\user.correct? Would that have the desired effect?

 

Hello chibuck, and welcome to Ten Forums. *Smile

That would be correct. You could do that to assign the other profile folder to the account.

 

Thanks so much for the quick response!

 

Shawn, you are a saviour. Very clear and concise. With a little knowledge from DOS days, RegEdit, and a file Commander, I was able to perform the transition from the dumb MS forced user name to my user name on other systems.

Now I can back up, mirror, easily sync, back up/restore from one laptop account to another (via my server). Ran all the programs, had to do some minor changes in pointing to certain files. Again "THANK YOU"! -= =-

 

You're most welcome Parfumeur. *Smile

 

I tried your steps, but got some weird behavior. It wouldn't let me log back into my original account. I got a message instead that it was creating a temp account for me. When I went back to the admin account and looked at the registry, my former SID now had ".bak" appended to it. I removed the ".bak" and tried to log in again. Finally, I renamed the user folder to what it had been named just before, and I was able to log in normally.

The user folder name used to be "druek." Then, as described below, it got changed to "Documents," which is confusing. I tried to rename it to "" following the above instructions. That's when I wasn't able to log in, and was forced to use a Temp account (or Admin). Once I renamed it to "Documents" I was able to log in.

Background:
The original problem started when I was moving some user folders to another partition. I realized the partition drive letter would not work (it was the same as my external backup drive). I moved everything back to C in preparation for renaming the drive letter (so connections to user folders wouldn't get broken). During the move I got a weird message about the Documents folder being merged with the Documents folder that already existed (I thought that meant the one in the user profile and on the partition drive, which contained different subfolders). I said OK and proceeded. All the folders and files were merged.

I can live with this user folder being named "Documents." What's weird is that in Security settings, the folder is still identified as "druek," the original profile name. I'd rather have things be consistent. Plus having a profile named "Documents" is weird, as you can imagine.

I could just start from scratch and revert to the original OS setup, but I'd rather not have to spend hours porting my files over from my old machine. On the other hand, I'm starting to spend hours on this issue. I'm still working on my W7 machine, and trying to set up my new W10 machine. So I can start over if need be.

If you'd like screenshots of the registry entries, I can provide them.

As always, your help is very appreciated.

 

Hello Druek, *Smile

It sounds like you moved your "Documents" folder to the root of your "Dreuk" folder by mistake causing this issue.

As a test, see if using an option in the tutorial below to restore the default location of your "Documents" folder may restore the correct name of your user profile folder.

*Arrow Restore Default Location of Personal Folders in Windows 10 User Accounts Tutorials

 

Hi Brink,

Nope, that's how I restored the Documents folder from the drive on the partition back to the C drive. The path shown in "Location" is "C:\Users\druek\Documents." I used the same procedure for all the other user folders (Downloads, etc.).

Okay, when I am in Explorer and look at the user folder in the navigation panes (left or right), it is listed as "Documents." And when I read it in the address bar, it is listed as ">(folder icon) > This PC > Windows (C*Smile > Users > Documents."

But when I click in the address bar to get the actual path, it reads, "(folder icon)>C:\Users\druek" as expected.

SOOO WEIRD! Hopefully there is a simple solution. Should I get out my Sharpie?

Thanks again for the lightning-fast reply.

PS Sorry about the emoticon above. I was trying to type "C : [backslash]"