Help!....Corrupt profile i believe

I am running windows XP on a gateway laptop (if more specifics are needed let me know). When I booted up my computer as usual this morning, I received a message on the welcome screen saying that my profile could not be loaded because it was corrupt. After a few minutes it seemed to have loaded a new (maybe temp) default administrator profile. Looking through the forum, it seems possible to get back my old settings and files, however I could not find a simple step by step process that I could understand. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,
Alex

 

Here is a search at the Microsoft about user profile it may help

http://search.technet.microsoft.com/search/default.aspx?siteId=1&tab=0&query=user+profile

 

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/811151/