Why do all changes in windows xp disappear after reboot?

Question

Windows

After the reboot, any changes (setting up the printer, installing a new program) with windows xp Home sp3 disappear. Everything is reset to one state. There are no third-party suspicious programs. Viruses too. Tell me what could be wrong?

Answer 1

Something like this can happen when Windows for some reason cannot create a user profile. In this case, it creates a temporary profile in the %SYSTEMROOT% directory and a new temporary profile is created with each boot, so everything that was changed in the previous temporary profile is not saved.
You can see where your profile is located with the command:
set USERPROFILE
If it returns the path pointing to "c:\Documents and settings", then most likely this is not the case. If the path is in c:\Windows - it's the same.