User Profile Folder Corruption

I have a Lenovo laptop (model is a ideapad 330S I believe) and have recently upgraded to Windows 11. This laptop is mainly used for my studies and by my mom on occasion so it has 2 accounts. My moms account (let’s call it account a) is somehow corrupt while my account (let’s call account b) is completely normal. I first noticed her account was corrupt because a number of features are unavailable. For example, there are no icons what so ever on the taskbar just a blank white bar on the bottom of the screen, the home button does nothing no menu start menu appears (haven’t tried windows + x or any other shortcuts which would be a good idea just thinking of it now) but windows r works, right click on desktop is delayed a good 10 seconds, ctrl shift esc no longer brings up task manager, and these are just what is first noticeable. It seemed I had to rely on my shortcut knowledge to navigate everything. So I opened a windows run box and opened up task manager to see if there was an issue with windows explorer which there wasn’t. Next stop the terminal. I opened up a CMD and immediately noticed the problem the user profile is using a TEMP folder. After realizing this I remembered an issue a week or so before where my mom asked me to save something and when I did it wasn’t there upon next startup so I had to save it through her account but to my profile folder. What would cause this? And how do I fix it? I have seen people try renaming the profile folder so their command line says whatever they want which involves making a new account and switching the identifiers via REGEDIT which I myself feel comfortable doing if someone can give me a proper tutorial (if this would be a solution). She does not want to delete the account and make a new one (she doesn’t trust me I’m in college for CyberSec and sometimes think I know everything). Any help or tips are appreciated thanks you.

Solution 1:

You will have to work out with your Mom about a new user account for her.

You cannot fix a damaged profile and certainly not by renaming it.

The only fix is to copy out all the data, documents, emails and favorites to a neutral location (C:\temp), delete the old account, make a new account, log in and recover the data and set it up.

Before you delete the damaged account, you can save the user profile off to an external USB drive so you still have it.

I have seen people try renaming the profile folder so their command line says whatever they want which involves making a new account and switching the identifiers via REGEDIT

I suggest you make a new profile normally as I laid out above. I have not seen a complete profile fix as you suggest might be possible. Some things still may not work.