Comments on: Renaming your Windows XP user account

By: Bill H

Bill H — Sat, 16 May 2009 15:48:13 +0000

This is great info, the only thing is that I am certain there must also be a file somewhere that knows the placement of my icons, the settings for my Startup menu and shortcuts, the preferences I have tweaked for months (years?) for my desktop image, program preferences and all that… is this true?? Can this ALSO be moved over to the new profile so I don’t need to spend hours re-tweaking all my personal and program preferences? THANKS! I’m happy to go into the registry if that’s what is required to do this.. not afraid of that.

By: Michael

Michael — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 01:37:48 +0000

Copy profile was greyed out, so this didn’t work for me. Even logging in as the adminstrator did not change that.

By: Greg

Greg — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 01:05:38 +0000

You have no idea how much this article is going to help me.

By: Jason

Jason — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 22:44:25 +0000

I think I figured out what happened for #5’s error (I got the same thing too). Fixed it by doing a three-account dance, using the Administrator account. Logged in under THAT account, copied the settings from “dad” (not the account’s real name) into “son”, then proceeded as advertised. Worked like a charm, seeing as the problem was that I was trying to overwrite a file that was in use (something regarding the cookies).

By: Tudor Marghidanu

Tudor Marghidanu — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 17:48:13 +0000

It’s a problem with the permissions. Probably you made “dads” files private. All you need to to it’s change the owner of the user directory in “Documents and settings” and everything should be ok.

By: fred

fred — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 03:01:23 +0000

Hm, seems like “Fred’s method” is causing some grief. It worked for me… I’ll try it again; maybe I made a mistake in my instructions. Sounds like there might be permissions issues, though.

By: hpum

hpum — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 02:19:20 +0000

Tried Fred’s method but got the error:
“failed to set security on the Destination Profile.Error-The directory name is invalid”

By: Merv

Merv — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 22:11:54 +0000

I tried that with my own computer earlier today, and it told me that the contents of the new directory couldn’t be deleted. Any idea what’s wrong there?

By: fred

fred — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 18:58:33 +0000

Martin is right– there was a typo in my original post. I have made the correction.

Thanks!

Fred

By: Martin

Martin — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 17:03:01 +0000

Fred says to copy the dad profile to C:\Documents and Settings\dad, but shouldn’t we be copying to C:\Documents and Settings\son?

I just want to be sure before I try it!