My desktop seems to be gone (User profile related I'm assuming)

[Stoney Mason]

Today when I boot my windows 8 machine I get a message everytime after I enter my user password that its preparing windows. When it gets to the desktop it looks completely different and there is a little pop up in the bottom right taskbar that says You're currently logged on using a temporary profile. I assume this is related to my user profile getting borked somehow. How do I fix this?

[archnemesis]

Just restore the latest image from your backup server.

[Stoney Mason]

This is my home computer. When I tried to do a system restore it said there were none. That shouldn't be the case but it is.

[archnemesis]

On a more serious note, go here and follow the instructions: http://mywindows8.org/fix-corrupt-profile-in-windows-8/

Operating systems do have the tendency to break so you should always keep a backup of everything important. If you keep your data completely separate from the Windows partition it's easy to reinstall everything from scratch.

[recursivelyenumerable]

I had this, or a similar problem a few times on win7. There is some command line utility you can run from safe mode to fix it, but every time I forgot the details and had to go through the same frantic googling process to find it again. 

[Stoney Mason]

I just reformatted the whole drive. Fuck it. I had some other issues also. I have had so many issues with Windows 8 in general for whatever reason. So many more than I ever had with 7.