Windows 8 Temporary Profile Issue

When I booted Windows today, I was presented with a message that says that I’ve been given a temporary profile.

Most of the instructions I found revolved around running sfc /scannow, but when I tried that I was told that the system was already locked by another process.

I checked when Windows Update last ran, and it looks like there was an update last night, which seems like it might be something to do with it. A bit more googling took me to this page which I’m going to summarise here for myself in future / in case that page disappears.

• Run regedit as administrator
• Find the path HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList
• Look at the keys in this path. Two of them (they’re quite long names) will be named the same, but one will have a .bak suffix.
• Rename the one without the suffix to have .new at the end
• Remove the .bak suffix from the other one
• Reboot your machine. It should start applying a Windows Update
• Log in, everything should be fixed