Windows 7 temporary profile issues (new Win7 machines replacing working WinXP)

[Xer]

I'm having trouble getting staff users logged on to our schools new Windows 7 machines.
Currently (on our winXP machines) users logon to a shared profile as managed through AD with the user profile paths all pointing to the same file. Write access to this profile is restricted. Our server is Windows Server 2008.
Once a Windows 7 machine is added to the network and put on the domain any staff that logon are given a temporary profile that is deleted once logged off.
I'm not sure where the issue lies, but this is not a simple "Go in and delete the profile" issue, because users do not have profiles there to delete. I have tried switching off temporary profiles through the default group policy, which just leaves users with a "Windows Profile Logon Service" error once their username/password is entered.
Do I need to change something with our old shared profile to make it Windows 7 compliant? Are there other reasons why Windows 7 would not like our current setup?

Once our users can logon I will then look into restricting access to the local machine, as our preferred way of working is to keep all the data on our server and backed up, users are given a home directory that is on a network drive.
This is giving me a real headache since i'm replacing all our old WinXP machines with Win7 machines while trying to keep the setup the same.
Thank you for any help.

[Steve21]

Why do you have all users pointing to a profile file, that's write restricted?

Surely either you're doing mandatory profiles, such that you don't need to restrict access, or they need their own profile to write to?

Steve

[ZeroHour]

Xer: just as a fyi, Vista/W7 profiles are different from XP ones, they are not compatible as such. Say you used \\server\share\userprofile1\profile\ as the xp path, the w7 profile must be \\server\share\userprofile1\profile.v2\ and thats where the w7 profile would be stored. XP profiles wont load into w7, the app data folder and other folders will but not the NTUSER.dat for example.

[Xer]

Alright, then I'll try pointing the user profile in AD to a .v2 profile and see how that works.

[ZeroHour]

Alright, then I'll try pointing the user profile in AD to a .v2 profile and see how that works.

Sorry I should have been clearer, no leave it, make a blank folder called profile.v2 and allow write permissions and see if it gets populated.

Windows 7/Vista automatically adds the .v2 part to the end, you dont need to specify it.

[Ric_]

I also had a number of these 'Temporary Profile' issues with Windows 7 and they did seem really random and intermittent. I found upgrading to SP1 fixed the problem.

I use roaming profiles for all but desktop and start menus.

Have you tried giving a 'normal' roaming profile to a user and testing to see if the problem occurs?

You will also see all manner of useful messages in the event logs regarding problems like this.

[wpjon]

It took us a while to figure out how to enable multiple users to use the same profile in Windows 7 but we have it working now. What we did was:

Set a users profile path in ad to a standard xp profile within a share on a server, eg \\server\share\profile

Ensure the user has write permissions to the share and ntfs write permissions to the folder of the share

Log on to a Windows 7 machine as the user, make changes to the profile as required and then log off, this will create a profile ending in .v2 in the share

Change the owner of the .v2 profile to the local administrators group

Change the ntuser.dat to ntuser.man

Set the profile path in ad for the users who you want to use this profile to the original profile path (without the .v2)

We had loads of problems until we found out about making the local administrators group the owner. By using this method the user will get the xp profile when logging on to an xp machine and will get the .v2 profile when logging onto a Windows 7/Vista machine.

[Xer]

Thanks everyone for the advice!
I've ended up creating a new mandatory folder for the profiles, created a .v2 version, and now both XP and 7 are using these with only a few issues surrounding where the staff have access to the C:\ drive when saving work (word documents etc.) the software defaults to a local My Documents instead of the network area assigned to each member of staff. I'm going to go look for any solutions to this in the forums.

[DaveyPitch]

Thanks everyone for the advice!
I've ended up creating a new mandatory folder for the profiles, created a .v2 version, and now both XP and 7 are using these with only a few issues surrounding where the staff have access to the C:\ drive when saving work (word documents etc.) the software defaults to a local My Documents instead of the network area assigned to each member of staff. I'm going to go look for any solutions to this in the forums.

That sounds like you still have the user libraries enabled. I've got them disabled and removed from the pc's here as I don't want any staff (outside the techs) to have access to the local drives, and people can use the Libraries feature to access it. There's a sticky at the top of this forum that has a link on how to remove it if you want to (or I can just post a copy of the reg file I made if you want)