A funny problem I ran into today was the following error:

The User Profile Service Service failed the logon. User profile cannot be loaded

Somewhere in my testing of a new mandatory profile I had made the old assumption that deleting the users profile from c:users would infact delete the profile… no such luck sir! Having removed that folder time and time again, I was faced with the above error.

Long story short,  from vista onwards, Microsoft have introduced a new user profile list, you can find it in:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftWindows NTCurrentVersionProfileList

Remove your sid out of that list if you have deleted the profile and try again.

To get your SID, try the below powershell code:

$objUser = New-Object System.Security.Principal.NTAccount(“$env:userdomain”, “$env:username”)
$strSID = $objUser.Translate([System.Security.Principal.SecurityIdentifier])
write-host “$env:userdomain$env:username = $strSID”