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Windows 10 How to Delete User Profile in Windows 10

[Tutorial] How to Delete User Profile in Windows 10

By Michael | Last Updated

In this post, we will focus on how to delete user profile in Windows 10 without deleting the user account itself. User profile stores all the settings for your desktop and other information related to your user account. In general, it is stored in the folder C:\Users\Username in your computer. You may want to remove the user profile without removing the account when your user profile has got corrupted or you want to reset it to default. Thankfully, steps to do this are not complicated in Windows 10. Now you will be offered 2 options to learn how to remove user profile in Windows 10.

  1. Option 1: Remove User Profile from Advanced System Properties
  2. Option 2: Delete User Profile from Registry Editor in Windows 10

delete user profile in windows 10

To remove a user profile in Windows 10 is not to delete a user account in Windows 10, but to reset all the data in the user account by deleting its profile. If you want to delete a user profile in your computer, you should make sure that your user account has administrative privileges. In addition, deleting the profile for the user account that you are currently signing in is not allowed. So when you are going to delete a user profile, you must sign in with another user account not with the one whose profile data you decide to delete.

Option 1: Remove User Profile from Advanced System Properties

How to remove a profile from Windows 10? The first option introduced to you is to remove a user profile in Windows 10 from Advanced System Properties. Now follow the below instructions to how to do it.

Step 1: Type the text of "SystemPropertiesAdvanced" without quotes in the Windows search blank and then hit Enter to open the Advanced System Properties panel.

open the advanced system properties panel

Step 2: Under the tab of Advanced, tap on the Settings button in the User Profiles section to open the User Profiles window.

click settings under user profiles

Step 3: Under the section of Profiles stored on this computer, select the profile of the user account that you want to delete and then click the Delete button to remove it.

delete the unwanted user profiles

Step 4: Click the button of Yes to confirm the deletion request. And then the profile of the user account will be removed right now.

click the yes button to confirm

Note: After you have deleted the old user profile, a new profile with all the default options and settings for the user account will be re-created automatically the next time the user signs in.

Option 2: Delete User Profile from Registry Editor in Windows 10

The second option provided for you is to delete user profile from registry editor. You may be curious about how to delete profile from regedit in Windows 10. Anyway, here is the fix.

Step 1: Open the File Explorer in your computer and then go to the folder of C:\Users.

Step 2: Find the profile folder of the user account which you want to delete, right click it, and then select Delete from the context menu to remove it. Then you can close File Explorer.

delete profile folder in file explorer

Step 3: Press the Windows key + R simultaneously on the keyboard to open the Run dialog box, type regedit in the blank, and tap on the OK button to open Registry Editor.

Step 4: In the Registry Editor, go to the key of ProfileList by navigating to the following path:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList

go to the key of profilelist

Step 5: In the left panel, go through the several subkeys under the registry of ProfileList until you find the value data of the ProfileImagePath string value for the user account that you want to delete. Then right click it and choose Delete to remove it.

delete the profileimagepath string value

Then click the button of Yes to confirm to delete it.

confirm to delete the value

If you complete the above 5 steps, you will delete the user profile for the account successfully, and it will be re-created using defaults the next time the user signs in.

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