I read the article, and now I am more confused than before. I have an i1Display2 colorimeter, NEC LCD3090 monitor and SpectraviewII software, which calibrates the display and controls its LUT, bypassing the LUT's in the video card. On booting Win7 64-bit, sometimes the Spectraview splash screen indicating the recognition of the monitor, and the checking for the correct profile/calibration does not come up; other times it does.
I don't know whether I should ignore that (could it sometimes execute before my desktop is fully showing?) or do I have a problem with the default profile being loaded? (Device Manager shows my i1D2 as working properly.)
In the advanced settings in Display>Settings>Advanced>Color Management, my latest profile appears as the default profile. How can I tell if it is loaded each time?
If you have a hardware calibrated display then Win7 stays out of the way (as you said, it bypasses the video card LUT). In this case the monitor profile (be it on system or user level) is only used by color managed application for conversions to the display space. We could say it's only metadata. Personally I'm using an EIZO CG241W with 64-bit Win7 without even installing the crappy EIZO ColorNavigator software - using basICColor Display to do the calibration.
I don't know the NECs but my EIZO holds the calibration data without need to reload anything at startup. I guess that the NEC is similar, so the Spectraview is only checking your color management setup, and it could be a Spectraview issue of failing sometimes. In this case (if the colors are also correct in both cases) I would ignore that Spectraview window (and maybe would send a mail to NEC to fix it).
BUT if Spectraview is needed to reload the monitor calibration at every startup, then you definitely have to contact NEC to fix Spectraview as Win7 knows nothing about hardware calibrated monitors and will not be able to load their calibration data.