Recently we had a very interesting issue. On two domain connected machines, users were not able to log on for the first time without getting “The User Profile Service failed the logon” error message. This isn’t the first time we had this issue and have fixed it before following Microsoft’s instructions.
However, in this case none of the fixes worked to solve the issue. There was no entry for the user to edit in the registry and no profile to copy.
What did fix the issue, is so long as an admin can still log into the computer (which in this case two admins could) then we could elevate the domain user account to a local administrator. It’s weird, but once that happens then the user can log into the machine normally. Once they log in you can remove their account from the local administrator group and their account will still function like normal.
It’s a quick and easy fix, but a bit of a bizarre one.
Know a better way, please comment below!