Phantom User ID

[Tubturner]

The last W10 update seems to have caused a real problem for me. It created a 'pseudo' or phantom user ID (account name). That is to say my original user ID is John and now I have a second user ID called John.heritagerd (it appended my street name to create the second ID) which seems to have become my default ID.
The system seems to have initially physically duplicated all my files so that every file that was in user John at the time of the W10 update  was copied to user john.heritagerd.  I would like to delete it but although the john.heritagerd ID shows in c:/users it can't be seen anywhere in any 'settings'.  I definitely I log on to W10 using ID john with the correct password the other ID seems to be the default user. The system will not allow me to delete C:\Users\John.HERITAGERD. Any idea on how I can remove this ID or at least stop it from being the default.

[patio]

A Win update will not create a phantom account...especially with that much personal info...

The account must have existed at 1 point in time.

[Mark.]

can you start an elevated command prompt and type in this;  powershell "get-wmiobject win32_useraccount | ft Name,Status,Disabled,@{name='Password';e={($_.PasswordRequired)}}"

that will list all the user account on the PC.attach the screenshot.

[Tubturner]

I hope I've attached a screen shot of the powershell run, once under john & once under john.heritagerd.
Hope this helps - I am most grateful for any help you can provide.
JA

[Mark.]

from that, you do only have the one User Account called John.

but from your description, and proven by your CD commands, your have a John and a john.heritagerd user folders.
the way heritagerd is capitalised reminds me of when Win7 (or was it XP) did repairs and auto-created new user profiles.
also, it isn't unheard of that when your user profile gets corrupted, Windows will make a new one, usually a temporary one, and it'll show a message during log in telling you.although I personally haven't seen a corrupted profile under Windows 10 yet.

I would create a brand new user login account, log out of the current one and into the new one.browse into the old two (c:\users\john and c:\users\john.hertigaterd) and transfer folder contents (pics, docs, music, emails, favourites etc) to the new user folder.
once you're happy everything has come across, remove those two profiles.

[Tubturner]

That'll take some doing but I'll give it a try.  Get back to you in a few days.  Thanks Mark.