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Windows 7 (and Vista) Roaming Profiles... and resetting them


I use roamin profiles - and I know that people have their own views on using them, so no flaming please! I use it for all users, and combine it with folder redirection to for speed and efficiency.

 

Here is an outline of my setup then... and some links to getting it set up the same way if you are so inclined.

 

All userdata is stored on SAN paths, mapped through DFS. But, but could have this on single servers equally, and it would work just fine. The root path is \\DNSNAME\Network\, with paths off this for home folders, profiles and redirection. A great Microsoft Article from the Directory Services team gives you the lowdown on how to get this set up, so rather than just repeat all of it - here is the link...http://blogs.technet.com/b/askds/archive/2008/06/30/automatic-creation-of-user-folders-for-home-roaming-profile-and-redirected-folders.aspx

 

Right... so youve got that all set up just nicely then, but someones profile gets corrupted? You go and delete the folder (yes the whole folder - do not just delete the contents or you will get a "Temporary Profile" message). Sorted... wrong, becuase this is a member of staff - who has a laptop. Laptops are set to cache logons, unlike workstations - so that they can logon offline at home. So you go and delete the folder there too. Youve done all this correctly, but you still get the "Temporary Profile" warning. What has gone wrong?

 

Vista and 7 store the profile paths in the Registry, and going in and deleting the folder remotely doesnt clean this up. If you logged on Locally, and used the Advanced User Control Panel to delete the profile and it would be fine.

 

To manually tidy up, follow the below...

 

1.Fire up regedit (yes you can do this remotely too - Connect Network Registry)

2.Locate the following registry subkey: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList

3. The ProfileList entries are all SIDs. This is a placeholder for the security identifier (SID) of the user account that is experiencing the problem. The subkey should contain a ProfileImagePath registry entry that points to the original profile folder of the user account that is experiencing the problem. Delete the subkey for the affected user.

4.Exit Registry Editor.

5.Log off the system.

6.Log on to the system again.

7.After you log on to the system, the profile folder is re-created

2 Comments


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vikpaw

Posted

Man, we've been suffering with this for so long, it's such a pain, having to do this, and guess what, if they actually roam a lot, then you need to clear their profile from all machines just in case a slow log on or duff network, means they pick up the old local profile! Add to that the fact that we had switch user feature enabled, so you could never be sure they were logged out of everywhere, and it's a nightmare. Caused no end of issues with SIMS too, as some reports didn't want to run, well, resetting the profile seemed to help, not sure why yet.

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