Windows 10: Corrupt user profile Creators Update, best course of action?

I have strong reasons to believe my user profile is corrupted following a manual upgrade to the Creators Update version 1703, with missing icons and other weird program behavior.

I'm unsure what might be the best thing to do, I could try to move my existing data to a new user profile but I'm unsure how successful that might be.

Is a corrupted user profile an indication that there is an issue with the particular Windows version or rather more a potential thing that can happen between upgrades? The other options could be to roll back to the previous version, restore the image backup I made before the upgrade or clean install version 1703.

With the latter, is version 1703 considered to be stable enough to clean install for a stable operating system right now? What would you recommend?

:)

 

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Many things in Windows 7 and Windows 10 remain the same. In the case of creating and managing user profiles very little has changed. The link below explains how to copy files from the existing user profile to the new profile.

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/fix-corrupted-user-profile#1TC=windows-7

Of course we do not know for the certain that it is a corrupt user profile that is causing the problems. As your own profile is trouble free then this could be an indicator that your wife's profile is corrupt. The best way to prove it one way or the other
is test a new profile. You have nothing to lose. If it is not a corrupt profile you simply continue to search for a solution.

 

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Hi JohnDRoe,

I'm Mark, stepping in for Leviozar to assist you further with this issue. It could be possible that this issue is due to a faulty user profile that has possibly been corrupted during one of the updates you have performed lately. While there is no known fix
for a corrupted user profile as of yet, the best that we could suggest is that you settle to a new user profile.

All the best.

 

Create a new profile as has been the case with every version of Windows when a profile is messed up. The other is to use a local profile, not a Windows live profile with 10, which has caused a lot of issues. Even with Linux and Mac OS, profiles can get mangled when they are remote profiles that load on any machine that you log into with that ID.

 

Both my admin and standard profiles are local accounts. It's hard to know whether both profiles are corrupted...

Is it as simple as moving the personal data to the new user profile?

 

Just create new profiles and do not move anything from the old.

 

That would mean all of my Documents, Downloads, Pictures, AppData etc would be deleted if I didn't move them to the new user account...

 

No, because that profile stays. Just create a new user profile at this point and anything in the user My folders, you would just need to move over to a pocket drive or move to public before removing the old profiles.

I keep all of my documents on a NAS and some on my iCloud, just in case I have to wipe a drive. Too many times losing photos and such, so I keep everything off of the machines and phones.

 

That data would still need to be transferred over to the new profile at some stage though wouldn't it? I have a backup of everything in a system image.

I'm actually starting to think there is corruption in the Windows installation itself and not just the user profiles. Some programs are displaying a weird graphical artifact when opening and minimizing on the desktop, even in the new test profile I created.

 

If you think that you need to do a wipe and clean image, do what you feel is best, but make sure all files in your personal folder (ie music, video, pictures, documents) are all saved either on a Pocket Drive or another computer before wiping out the hard drive for the machine in question.