I temporarily disabled (not deleted) a user account by going to the properties menu and checking the "Account is disabled" box. An hour later I re-enabled the account by removing the check, but when the user logged in he encountered a fresh default desktop, and all his documents and settings had disappeared. This is not as expected. Is there any means of restoring the documents? Thanks.

Hi Zaphod,

Are there any unusual errors recorded in the Event Viewer(Event Viewer \Windows Logs \System or Applications and services logs \Microsoft \Windows \User profile Service) ?Have you checked the existence of the account in this path ?
C:\Users  navigate to the account you have disabled .

If it existed,we can refer to this link to fix the corrupted user profile .
Fix a corrupted user profile
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-hk/windows/fix-corrupted-user-profile#1TC=windows-7

If the issue persists ,we can perform a system restore to recover the machine to a previous  point before we made modifications to the account .

As a troubleshoot method ,we can create a new account and then disable to have a test to check whether this is caused by the machine or the specific account .

Best regards

• Edited by MeipoXu 6 hours 31 minutes ago