Usually Fridays are happy days because the weekend is so close, but Windows 8 can ruin this mood damn fast. At least for me…

So, i started my Friday, hopping i will get done as much as possible because i was behind with my work. I turned on my pc (with a normal Windows 8) and i noticed that each 2-3 minutes my taskbar and my desktop are disappearing and all my explorer windows are closing automatically. Obviously i thought a restart will fix this. NOT!!! I started to search for solutions. First, a friend asked me to look for the cause with the Window’s Event Viewer and i discovered the following error:

Faulting application name: explorer.exe, version: 6.2.9200.16628, time stamp: 0x51a94434
Faulting module name: SecurityManager.dll_unloaded, version: 0.0.0.0, time stamp: 0x52dd9206
Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x000007fcfddcfdbc
Faulting process ID: 0x1910
Faulting application start time: 0x01cf2414fa059346
Faulting application path: C:\WINDOWS\explorer.exe
Faulting module path: SecurityManager.dll
Report ID: 5dafa787-9008-11e3-be9b-c485084838f1
Faulting package full name:
Faulting package-relative application ID:

Cool, right? Searching on Google i discovered this article:

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows8_1-performance/getting-error-code-0xc0000005-with-windows/2d159e7f-150a-4d2d-b0a9-9a06e680b672

…which didn’t work. I tried all kind of solutions, including windows repair, restoring to a previous date when the computer was working properly and many others. After a lot of time wasted nothing worked and my taskbar and desktop were still disappearing. In the end i found another solution: i created 2 more users, a new one and a “temporary” one. I logged in with the temporary one and copied the user files from the old user to the new user and it worked.

This is the complete solution: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/fix-corrupted-user-profile#1TC=windows-7

Note: when you copy the files from the old user to the new one, you need to have enough disk space because even if in Properties windows was showing me just 7 GB, actually my old user’s folder was having 26GB.