Well, this will teach me to trust the official Windows Vista help website. After running the Live Installer to bring myself up to the Live Writer and Live Photo Gallery wave 3 betas (and update Live Messenger to the latest, although that was unsuccessful), I had to restart my computer because Windows Update also decided to do its magic today. The machine restarts, I log in, and… “User profile cannot be loaded.”

Uh oh, what?

After Windows built me a temporary profile, I quickly created a new, temporary admin account and changed into it. Checking the event log, I noticed that there are bad blocks on the disk. Putting two and two together, I figured that the profile registry hive was corrupt. So off to the Vista help site for information about recovering a corrupt profile. What do you know, my prayers are answered! Or so I thought.

Turns out that doing the instructions there don’t really do the trick too well. If you’re not blessed with an iron constitution and knowledge of NTFS file permissions, you’d probably be better off just creating a new profile and starting anew. Or if you’re at least smart enough to make backups (which, apparently, I ain’t), restore your latest one after at least running chkdsk.

After many heart-wrenching hours (yes, literally, hours — I’ve been at it from about 1am this morning until perhaps 20 minutes ago), I found this happy little trick which restored my user profile and not-corrupted registry hive. After all that, I just want to cry, but as a guy, that just isn’t allowed. Oh well, I can always wrestle with the next bear that invades my neighbourhood.

Now, only at the end, can I enjoy the Live Writer and Live Photo Gallery betas. Too bad the Zemanta plugin isn’t working in this latest Live Writer beta, though. And that the attempt to update Live Messenger makes it crash on login, every time. Time to fix some other problems.