My gamer profile got corrupted a few days ago. I have no idea why - I didn’t drop my machine, spill anything on it, or delete something while turning it off. In between games of Feeding Frenzy, my sister comes up to me and says, “Your profile’s gone.” What, I say?

Sure enough, my console said “0 profiles”. Not good. I tried the Gamertag Recovery tool, but at the end it would always say, “Can’t Save Profile, either you don’t have enough space, or your storage location isn’t connected right.” Really not good.

I deleted demos down to 8 gigabytes free, took my harddrive on and off, but the Recovery tool still wouldn’t work. There HAD to be enough space, simply because some people store their profiles on little 64 MB memory cards, while I had 8 gigs free! I knew my HD was connected correctly, because I could play arcade games on it.

I called Xbox Support at 1-800-4MYXBOX and the guy (James? Kent? I can’t remember…) had no idea what the problem was, either. Finally, while on the phone, I went to the Gamer Profiles section of the Memory, and there was listed a “Corrupt Profile”. Ah ha! There’s ol’ Stonesand, corrupt to the core. I deleted it, and then tried the Recovery tool, which worked this time. I was sure to pick the “Don’t delete my saved games” option, and they all seem to be there.

There were several problems with this experience. First, the text is misleading - the Recovery tool was constantly telling me that it would delete all of my save games, which it didn’t.

Second, the main profile selection screen saying 0 profiles, when there really was one there (a corrupt one), was less informative than it could be, and was the reason Xbox Support couldn’t figure this out.

Third, the error about Can’t Save Profile was wrong - there was a conflicting, corrupt profile in the way of the fresh one the Recovery tool was attempting to create, which wasn’t an option presented by this error message.

So, be careful. Delete any corrupt profile(s) first before attempting to Recover them!

On a second note, Conan the VIIIth and have been having problems joining each other’s games (when he or I were the host), and talking to each other. I finally discovered that it was occuring because, when running the XBL connection test, it reported my NAT as Moderate. Perhaps Conan also has the same problem - he’ll fix it, if that is the case. NAT needs to be reported as Open on both ends if you want to be able to connect to everyone, and hear their voices. You can’t control the host, but you can at least control your own.

This problem occured both in original Xbox games, and Xbox 360 games.

If your router is reporting your NAT as Moderate, or (worse) Strict, there a couple of things you can do. First, make sure you aren’t filtering out any NAT packets in your router firmware. Second, make sure UPnP is enabled. This one change moved me from Moderate NAT to Open. Third, if nothing else works, you probably need to get a new router.

You can check the router compatability list at:
http://www.xbox.com/en-US/support/connecttolive/xbox360/homenetworking/equipment.htm

Note that on this page, when you find your router, you should click on its name or version if it is a link. There may be additional gotchas, inside. Also, note that my router is not on this list, yet I clearly can connect to XBL. That’s probably because the WRT54GL is exactly the same as the WRT54G just with more RAM, so that people can load in new firmwares based on the larger Linux kernal. Which I have done. Ask me in this post if you have any DD-WRT, or NAT questions.

I’m using a brand-spanking new Linksys WRT54GL with DD-WRT v23 loaded as the firmware. It’s workin’ great.