User profiles being changed to have an extension

Question

We use a domain for user profiles where their user names are set up like ab912345. We have had several users lose their whole profile suddenly upon logging in when they arrive. I had thought perhaps it was a temporary profile issue but there was no .bak profile in the registry editor. I noticed that in the user folder there is the original folder with the name ab912345, but there is also a newly created user folder named ab912345.gwi. When I look in the registry editor, there is no longer an entry for the original and only the .gwi variant exists.

Can I somehow recover their old data by editing the entry?
Or is there a way to prevent this from happening?

The profiles are roaming, so the first sign in must be on the network, but the users this has happened to are mostly desktop user who never leave the network. I'll be glad to provide any other information I can if needed.

Answer 1

Might be the domain name? and expected behavior. If you logon to the local machine first, then to the domain you would end up with two profiles.
%username%
and
%username%.%userdomain%
Else if you logon to the domain first, then to the local machine you would end up with
%username%
and
%username%.%computername%

For a work-around you can logon once as the new domain user so the new profile gets created, then logon as another user with local admin rights, navigate to
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList

find the new domain profile and point the expand string ProfileImagePath to the old profile.

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