There is often confusion between the two. But knowing what each profile type means is an important step in understanding what is going wrong with the profile.
TEMP profiles
These are often created when the local profile and the roaming profile are not the same. For example, a user logs on to their normal workstation and as the local profile is compared against the roaming profile, some file is missing, or some folder or file security rights in either of the profiles have been modified that do not allow it to be read or written so that both the profiles cannot be merged. An example of mismatching profile can be found here.
Another cause of TEMP profiles is when a local profile file is opened (or gets “hooked”) by some system or application process before logon or during logon, preventing, for example, ntuser.dat from opening. An example of this can be found here; and you can also recreate this by remotely opening a handle to the ntuser.dat of any user profile by using the remote Registry > Load Hive in regedit and then trying to log on as that person on the workstation which you loaded their hive. I was both victim and the offender in this example here. In both these cases TEMP profiles protect the integrity of the local profile.
And finally, TEMP profiles are also created when the local user profile folder is renamed or removed but the registry profile remains intact. A registry profile on the affected system means the user has at some point logged on to that workstation but Windows cannot locate the folder profile defined in the ProfileImagePath string of the registry profile (more on that below).
Windows Explored 