I came home to find my favorites missing in IE 10! I clicked on favorites and I saw "Add to favorites", "Add to favorites bar", and "Organize favorites", but my favorites were gone; I had a lot. I checked out the favorites folder too see if it still existed; all my favorites were still there. I checked the registry to see if my favorites folder was still described as "%userprofile%/Favorites"; it was. I checked out permissions and all sorts of things on the system, but nothing helped. I should have beeen seeing my favorites, but they weren't there in IE 10.
I had created a user profile for my wife on Serval (this system) which she had never used, but I had made it an administrative account. I logged in as Lorraine instead of dave, and checked out IE 10; the favorites were still there! I copied my Favorites folder to the Lorraine account and I was able to see all of them in IE 10. At this point I decided to copy my entire user profile to Lorraine, and then remove dave from the system. I'm logged in right now as Lorraine (I've already moved everything from dave to Lorraine and removed dave - then re-created dave so I'd still have another administrator account to fall back on).
So how do you copy a user profile? In fact, what is a user profile? In Windows 7, a user profile is a folder path that starts with C:\Users\username and continues down to folders like C:\Users\username\Favorites . username has his/her own favorites, so when username logs in and brings up IE, the favorites, username sees are those in C:\Users\username. There is another folder that is found along the path C:\Users\username\Desktop and as you'd expect, everything in that folder is what username sees on his/her desktop. I.e., by copying everything below C:\Users\dave to C:\Users\Lorraine Lorraine becomes dave (merged, but Lorraine hadn't been used, so I didn't have to worry about the implications of merging).
Copying folders from one profile to another profile presents some problems. If I logged in as dave then some of the folders would be impossible to move because of files in them that would be locked. If I logged in as Lorraine then I'd run into some permission problems. I re-booted into safe mode and was able to drag and drop most of the folders. Folders that gave me error messages when I tried to drag them were usually movable with the xcopy command; e.g., C:\>xcopy C:\Users\dave\Favorites C:\Users\Lorraine /j /y /r /h /c /e (Favorites didn't require xcopy; this is just an example). Some folders were nasty enough that I had to drill down in them and move them by sub-folders; e.g., C:\Users\dave\AppData\Local
Don't forget e-mail! I'm using MS Outlook 2010, but the following applies to practically all versions of Outlook, going back to Outlook 2000 (maybe earlier, but I wasn't using Outlook before this century - I was using VAX mail, 30 years ago). Export your Outlook accounts to pst files and import them to Outlook in your new profiles. In Outlook 2010 you do the following:
1.
Start Outlook
2. Click on the File tab
3. Click on Open
4. Click on Import
5. Click on Export to a file
6. Click on Outlook Data File
7. Select the folder you want to save ; click on Next.
8. Enter the file name you want to save as; click OK.
9. Select the radio button "Replace..." and click finish
You import the pst files into Outlook the same way (the first three steps, anyway). There are plenty of articles on the Internet about exporting and importing pst files, but the above will get you started, and at the very least, save your e-mail.
When I started writing this blog I was thinking the most important part of it was to describe what a user profile really is; demistify the term. Understanding what a user profile is and the data structure used by Microsoft for storing favorites will allow you to get your favorites back the way I did. However, writing this blog made me realize that the most important part of the process for most users is saving their e-mail. Most users take their e-mail for granted; i.e., they never consider it something that requires their attention other then just using it (you don't have to study auto mechanics to drive a car). So if a blog like this doesn't explicitly state the need to backup e-mail when changing user accounts, most users will just lose their e-mail.