Windows 7 - corrupt user profile

Hello. I've offered to help out a friend with an issue they're having with their laptop and Windows 7.

They have two accounts/user profiles. One isn't password protected, and is a 'secondary' account. You just click on the profile picture and bang, you're in.

The other is the Administrator account, and this is where the problem lies. When you enter the password and attempt to log in, you get the message: 'The User Profile Service failed the logon. User profile cannot be loaded.'

I've seen various methods of how to fix this. Some involve entering via safe mode, some involve editing the registry, etc. I'm okay to attempt those, but with the latter in particular, I'd rather not if I can avoid it.

Does anybody have experience of doing this and can share a method that's worked? Thanks chaps.

I helped out someone with this a while back.

I don't remember the exact details (I think I googled it), but I basically went into safe mode and used a 'restore point' - I think there was one from a few days previous.

They weren't really big users of the machine so if it did lose anything they didn't seem to be aware of it.

I know that's not a lot of detail but it might give you encouragement to go the 'safe mode' route....