Vista toolbar customizations lost at next logon

[Ergaster]

Managing 2 different Vista machines, one a 32 bit and the other x64, both using auto-login and a large-icon Quick Launch toolbar (for seniors).

The Quick Launch toolbar keeps collapsing and getting reset to the left under a >> popup menu when the systems are started or waked. Not every time though. Been struggling with this for years, and the only fix I can rely on is having them roll back the OS partition to the last ghost backup, which takes 10 minutes. Data partition with browser and email settings survives a restored OS.

My reading of this is that a default setting is being used in error. I've read things about a "race condition" involving auto-login that may have been fixed in some versions of Windows, but no updates have fixed these machines yet. I don't see this problem in XP sp3, but there's no UAC running, so maybe that's it.

The toolbars should hold their settings, period. Since this bug will lose any extra toolbars and leave only the default Quick Launch folder toolbar, it makes things very difficult for novice users. Also, possibly related, some desktop icons that were moved to toolbar folders suddenly show up again on the desktop, and the documents folder loses its "by type" sorting.

What I'd like to do is find the custom settings for the user account, and copy them over the default settings in the registry, adding a tracer tag so I know when the bug has struck, like making Quick Launch show its title text or something. That way, no matter what, even if this bug is never fixed, the machines will look and work as set.

Poking around the registry has turned up some possible locations involving "streams" keys, but I don't know how they work. If you do, point us in the right direction, please.