What happened to Windows?

Question

Windows

Good afternoon.
Somewhere else, one warm winter evening, I turn on the computer and I almost had a heart attack. There is not a single shortcut on the desktop except for the trash, the desktop background is black. After a short analysis, it was revealed that almost all programs remained (some had to be reinstalled). Labels had to be manually restored. What it was I did not understand.
But now, sometimes when you turn on the same crap. Black background. There are no labels. And sometimes everything is fine. The screensaver and shortcuts are all in the wrong places.
What could it be?

Answer 1

Perhaps for some reason the directory with the user profile is not available.
Usually it is located in c:\Users\<username>
If a user profile is not available, Windows generates a temporary profile with default settings. Accordingly, there will not be any of your shortcuts on the desktop, applications installed in the profile will also not be available.
A temporary profile, as far as I remember, is generated somewhere in c:\windows\system32 (if c:\users is not available).
You can check the location of the current profile in cmd.exe by entering the command:
set USERPROFILE
If you really have this situation, then you need to figure out why your work profile is not available.
Options:
1. the profile is not in the default directory, but moved to another disk/partition and this disk/partition is not currently available.
2. Organizations often use network profiles, in which case the server where the user profiles are located may not be available.
3. all in the same vein
Another option - the user's registry is collapsing. I've come across this a few times. This problem always manifests itself in different ways, depending on what exactly breaks in the registry.
In this case, it is best to create a new user in the system and work from under it, transfer the data from the old profile to the new one, delete the old user.