Unable to open current profile error in Battlefield 2

I had a brand new installation of Battlefield 2 today, provided via Steam, which upon opening would give a “LOGERROR_unable to open current profile” error message and then close before I was able to play the game.

The Steam installation is on a removable hard drive attached to a “corporate” build Windows 7 Laptop. Other Steam games were running fine in this configuration, the internet connection was functioning, and there was plenty of disk space- nothing obvious that would cause an error. A quick Google showed up a number of people have had a similar issue, and it was down to the My Documents folder in Windows being redirected to a network share.

As I mentioned, this is a corporate build laptop so “My Documents” is redirected to the H: drive or in UNC terms \\homes.mycompany.com\home\. Following the advice given on the forums of resetting my My Documents to the default C:\Users\username path was not an option, neither was setting up different mappings on the server side.

However looking in my Steam folder showed me that a homes.mycompany.com folder had been created when I tried to run the game, with a subfolder home, so perhaps if Battlefield wanted to look there I just needed to point that at my real home directory. My H: drive is configured for offline files, so if this worked then it would continue to do so even when I wasn’t attached to the company network.

This was achieved using a Windows “symbolic link”, creating a link within the Battlefield folder to my real My Documents folder. I deleted the home subfolder and it’s contents and then ran this command:

1mklink /D “E:\steam\steamapps\common\Battlefield 2\homes.mycompany.com\home” H:\

It was necessary to run this command in a command prompt running as administrator. E:\Steam is the path to my external hard drive where my Steam installation resides. This left me with a symbolic link called home inside the ....\Battlefield 2\homes.mycompany.com\ folder which as far as Battlefield was concerned was my My Documents folder.

Finally time to test the solution (always the best bit when a game is involved!) and I’m pleased to say it was a success. Battlefield 2 loaded and allowed me to start a game.