Hi

As you will guess from the rest of this post I am a bit of a computer
dinosaur, so please bear with me !

I stupidly turned my PC off by pressing the button on the base unit.  When I
turned it on again I clicked on my name on the welcome screen as usual.  The
following message then came up:

"Windows cannot load the user profile but has logged you on with the default
profile for the system.
DETAIL - the system has attempted to load or restore a file into the
registry, but the specified file is not in a registry file format"

I have no idea what this means !  All my favourites, background etc has been
lost !

The other profile on the welcome screen works fine.

I use windows XP.  

Any advice very gratefully received.