After installing Visual Studio 2013 with Update 1 (or Update 2 RC; maybe also the RTM version – haven’t tried that one), you may be getting an error saying “The User Profile Service service failed the sign-in. User profile cannot be loaded.”, following an unsuccessful login.

ISSUE:
During Windows login, user gets an error saying “The User Profile Service service failed the sign-in. User profile cannot be loaded.”. After that, user is unable to login successfully. This was happening to users logging in for the first time (local of domain, doesn’t matter).

Although I’ve seen this error mostly with Windows 8.1 clients, other versions may be getting the same error, because this seems to be Visual Studio issue.

RESOLUTION/WORKAROUND:
After little “digging”, I’ve noticed the following (warning 1509, errors 1511 and 1500):

It looks that Windows cannot copy some files from the Default user profile (warning 1509) which finally made the user unable to login (error 1500). So, I went to the folder in question (C:\Users\Default\AppData\Local\Microsoft\VSCommon\12.0\SQM), and checked the permissions:

After that, I’ve added full permissions to the Everyone group on this folder, subfolders and files (I know – it’s not the security best practice, but… ), and then it worked – user logged in successfully.

As far as I’ve observed – with Update 2 (clean install), this folder is empty (there are no .sqm files in it – I’m not really sure what was their purpose), so this issue shouldn’t be happening anymore.

Have a great weekend!

P.S. I’m strongly encouraging you to install Update 2.