For a couple of months I have been having intermittent problems with my Windows Server 2008 machine that hosts my virtual machines. I was unable to log in using remote desktop and occasionally the console login would fail as well. Today I created a new user account and tried to log in using that account. That is when I got the error "The User Profile Service service failed the logon". In looking at the user profiles on the machine the new user profile hadn’t been set up. I tried to go into the user properties and compared the account that was having problems to a working account but that didn’t reveal any differences.

I binged the error message and found I wasn’t the only one with the problem. There were a few good articles with solutions including a walk through of editing the registry, Microsoft’s knowledge base article complete with a fix it button, an article that suggested using an alternate format for the user name. I decided to try them from what I thought was the simplest to the most difficult.

I tried the alternate format for the user name. That didn’t work.

I was about to try the fix it button which looked like it might delete the user when I saw a comment in a forum that suggested turning off UAC, logging in, and turning on UAC again. I tried that. After turning off UAC I had to reboot for the change to take affect. (I had rebooted previously thinking that the service might be hung). I was able to log in and the user profile was created. I turned UAC back on, rebooted, and am still able to log in so it looks like the problem is fixed.

Now I can go back to worrying about other issues…