I recently had to recreate a Vista profile again and with this process being a little more complicated in Vista than it was back in XP I thought I’d pass along the info.

If you try to do it the same way you have in the past with XP.  By deleting the profile folder as the administrator and the relogging in as the user you’ll find you get stuck in a “temporary” profile.  Which gets regenerated everytime you login.  Most likely NOT what you were looking for.  But fortunently you haven’t gotten too far off the path.

Recreating A Vista Profile

1. Login as administrator delete the username folder in C:\Users\

2. open the registry and go to

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList

Locate the S-1-5-xx key which had the old profile name and delete it.

3. Reboot the system

4. Let the user login