Saturday, January 16, 2010

Loading your settings failed. (Access is denied.)

I restored a PC from backup using the ntbackup utility. I restored all programs and content on the C:\ including the windows directory and program files. I also restored the systemstate meaning I restored the registry, all user accounts, drivers etc.

However I did not restore the profiles!

I could log in fine with a standard user account. However my profile settings did not save. Also when I ran a VB Script I got the following error:

Loading your settings failed. (Access is denied.)



I went into the registry and saw that my HKCU for that user was only read only for all users. My user account did not have ownership and "Full Control" of the entire HKCU key and all sub keys.



This was a hard problem as I couldn't exactly run regedit.exe as Administrator as then it would show me the HKCU for the Administrator account. HKCU is the ntuser.dat file in the users profile directory. It is registry settings unique to that user profile... so when you open regedit it will only display the HKCU settings for that user's ntuser.dat file!

The way I fixed this was I added that user into the "Administrators" group. I then went in and took ownership of the HKCU key and all sub keys. Then took full control. I then removed the user from the "Administrators" group.
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8 comments:

  1. Jim_SJune 7, 2010 at 8:46 AM

    Thanks!

    ReplyDelete
  2. UnknownOctober 5, 2010 at 5:45 AM

    Thank you for this solution! It really helpt me!

    ReplyDelete
  3. rajeshDecember 12, 2010 at 10:41 PM

    I have a user u1 created in DC. I copied the local user running in a local machine to u1. But when i logged in with u1 to the domain., it gives me the "Loading your settings Failed"... I tried this solution. but its not working... any idea...

    ReplyDelete
  4. AnonymousApril 18, 2011 at 12:03 AM

    It works. Thanks a lot.. Make the changes as suggested and restart the PC !!!!

    ReplyDelete
  5. AnonymousApril 29, 2011 at 6:44 AM

    thanks for your solution. it saves my time.

    ReplyDelete
  6. IanFebruary 21, 2012 at 7:49 AM

    Hi

    Could you give exact detailed steps, I have the exact same problem but am not in as Administrator, is it possible to give Full permissions to a read only user?

    ReplyDelete
  7. AceMay 28, 2012 at 6:50 PM

    how to follow this blog? i'm a blogspot member also.

    ReplyDelete
  8. AnonymousNovember 9, 2012 at 6:49 AM

    Thank you SO MUCH for this solution - the read-only on the HKCU was preventing the clients on my system from accessing an SQL database on the 2k3 Server (in some roundabout way) so this has saved me rebuilding my entire SQL server. You are a genius!!

    ReplyDelete

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