This particular case is especially interesting because it affected a large number of users and the troubleshooting process made use of one of Process Monitor’s lesser-known features. The case opened when a customer contacted Microsoft support reporting that several of their users would occasionally get this error message when loggging on to their systems:

This caused Windows to create a temporary profile for the user’s logon session. A user profile consists of a directory, %UserProfile%, into which applications save user-specific configuration and data files, as well as a registry hive file stored in that directory, %UserProfile%\Ntuser.dat, that the Winlogon process loads when the user logs in. Applications store user settings in the registry hive by calling registry functions that refer to the HKEY_CURRENT_USER (HKCU) root key. The user’s loss of access to their profile made the problem critical, because whenever that happened, the user would apparently lose all their settings and access to files stored in their profile directory. In most cases, users contacted the company’s support desk, which would ask the user to try rebooting and logging in until the problem resolved itself.

Source: http://blogs.technet.com/markrussinovich/archive/2009/08/10/3272210.aspx