i've had a very wierd problem with my windows 2000 set up. all of my profile settings have disappeared. windows has made a folder with my old settings in a .bak folder. does anyone know what would have done this? is the profile corrupted? i have patched back together a profile which is just about working, but it keeps trying to install ms office. any insite would be apreciated. cheers, j

Yes the profile is corrupt. Nothing you can do but copy what you need from .bak profile into the new profile. You can try and rename the .bak one to the new profile, but that will most likely not work.

that's right. i set the current profile to use the .bak directory instead and that lead to about 10 minutes of crunching the hd when i logged on. it didn't manage to make a very good backup and i lost shortcuts and office settings. office install now keeps looking for a file called data1.msi. do you know how to stop this happening. office works fine once i hit cancel a few times. cheers, j

Blah. Just had the same problem myself. My own fault for faffing with the NTuser.DAT file I guess (I wanted to see what it was recording about me - I know the old user.dat used to hold info on last files used, websites visited and so on - for your info NTuser.dat holds about the same.) Anyway - removing your .msi problem - the msi files are normally copied into the temp folder during install - of course you're not installing so it's not there! The only way I found to fix this was to reinstall the product (in your case office). You have to time it right tho' - in my case Win2000 was asking for the .msi file about every 60secs, and if that prompt screen was visible, the software wouldn't install. Anyone know how I can delete the default admin account? I was foolish enough to be using that account when I was messing around. I've deleted all the files in the relevant folder (C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator), but I still can't remove the user from the user list. Thanks!

sorry, mate, don't know how to delete the admin account... i did find out how to fix the .msi problem that i was having though - all i had to do was to open power point and let it crunch on the disk for a while, click cancel a few times when it had a sulk about not being able to find the correct files and then it opened fine. then i found that all the other office programs were now working ok - no reinstall time after all!!!