I installed Vista RC1 on a separate partition to create a dual boot with XP Pro. Everything seemed to be fine until I tried the Live OneCare Beta for Vista. I assumed it would not affect the partition where XP Pro resides, but evidently I was wrong. Since the OneCare intall, my profile and all it's associated files, My Documents, Outlook data files, etc. are gone. I have searched all the drives various ways and even tried a System Restore on the XP boot to a time before the OneCare Beta for Vista install with no luck. Pretty weird. It's not a critical machine, used mostly for testing, but I can't seem to figure out what happened.

I have a similar setup with Vista (RTM) & XP Pro and my dual boot did not suffer a similar fate. I am not sure what went wrong, but something apparently did.

It seems to have been related to the OneCare install on the Vista that caused all the problems. I had been running it like that for a long time with no problems, just was gonna give OneCare a test drive on Vista.

I meant I do have Windows Live OneCare v1.5 Beta on the Vista side of the machine ;-)

New information. I found what looks like the original profile, but I can only see it when booted in Vista, it gives an "access denied" message in the XP boot. I tried to copy it to a different folder while in Vista and then restore with only partial results. Still trying other things. I cannot figure out how Vista, OneCare, and or something else hid a profile from XP. Each time I log on as that user, it creates a new profile like a first time user. I have performed all the normal malware scans and I've found nothing so far. Just really weird.