Deleted User Profile - How to Relink MySite (SharePoint 2010)

I've had a very interesting case on a SharePoint 2010 environment. A user's account was deleted accidentally by their internal AD team on Friday the 13th :) The account got recreated, but when the user tried to open MySite, they got "Access Denied" when clicking on "Contents".

I've made sure the user is the Site Collection Admin, checked every possible permission level and even re-added it just in case. No luck.

With the Farm Admin account, I was able to see the Contents of this user at all times.

I've come up with the following approach after a few hours of IIS / ULS logs reading that were simply showing 401 when this particular user tried to access their own MySite.

- Deleted the MySite (ensured we've got a fresh backup).
- The user then recreated a blank MySite.
- I've restored the backup with the Restore-SPSite command.

At this stage, I was able to see the contents with the Farm Admin account again, but when the user tried, he got the following error:

The attempted operation is prohibited because it exceeds the list view threshold enforced by the administrator.

And the respective ULS log entry:

The attempted operation is prohibited because it exceeds the list view threshold enforced by the administrator.
 at Microsoft.SharePoint.SPGlobal.HandleThrottleException(COMException comEx)    
 at Microsoft.SharePoint.Library.SPRequest.CrossListQuery(String bstrUrl, String bstrXmlWebs, String bstrXmlLists, String bstrXmlQuery, ISP2DSafeArrayWriter pCallback, Object& pvarColumns)    
 at Microsoft.SharePoint.SPWeb.GetSiteData(SPSiteDataQuery query)    
 at Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages.AggregationWebPart.RunQuery(SPSiteDataQuery query)    
 at Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages.UserDocsWebPart.GetEligibleItems()    
 at Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages.AggregationWebPart.RenderWebPart(HtmlTextWriter writer) Inner Exception: The attempted operation is prohibited because it exceeds the list view threshold enforced by the administrator.  
 at Microsoft.SharePoint.Library.SPRequestInternalClass.CrossListQuery(String bstrUrl, String bstrXmlWebs, String bstrXmlLists, String bstrXmlQuery, ISP2DSafeArrayWriter pCallback, Object& pvarColumns)    
 at Microsoft.SharePoint.Library.SPRequest.CrossListQuery(String bstrUrl, String bstrXmlWebs, String bstrXmlLists, String bstrXmlQuery, ISP2DSafeArrayWriter pCallback, Object& pvarColumns)

Now... the list view treshold was set to 5000 for non-admins (default) and 20 000 for admins (again default). I've lifted it to 20 000 for non-admin users as well, just to find out it doesn't matter. No luck.

I've even decided to make the user a Farm Admin for a minute... again nothing changes.
Whenever he tried to access any of the libraries in "My Site", Unexpected error. The webpart "SharePoint Documents" still saying the stupid message about the List View Tresohld.

Maybe I should have mentioned that there are nowhere near 5000 items in that user's MySite in total.

So... next steps.

- Deleted the User Profile from SharePoint.
- Issued an Incremental Sync to import it - it didn't import.
- Issued a Full Sync - not imported again.
- Recreated the User Profile in SharePoint manually with all the properties

And still at the same stage...

Finally... I've decided to use the Export/Import instead of Backup and Restore and I did not use the -IncludeUserSecurity on purpose... as I am thinking that the old account is still referred to somewhere in the site permissions and that's causing all the headaches. Boom! All working fine now after the Import.

The only downside would be that the "SharePoint Documents" webpart which is the default one visible when you go to "Contents" under MySite will be showing no documents... as when I've used the Export method with the Farm Admin account now all documents show as modified by this account. Anyway once the user edits (or just check-out / check-in) a few documents, this webpart populates again and there's finally nothing more to worry about. Just be careful when deleting AD accounts :)