In a mess! XP, Mandatory Profiles, Office 2003 and server migration

[Andie]

Somehow at some point, a default file location for saving in Office 2003 seems to have been saved into the XP mandatory profile on our system. Unfortunately this references the share on our Server 2003 server. Which was fine until we migrated to Server 2012.....

 

Basically, our students are trying to save files on XP laptops in Office 2003 and the system is not happy because Word etc are then trying to access the share on the old server. It's taken me a while to work out what was happening, as all our GPO file redirections are correct but there was obviously a conflict somewhere. By chance I found that Word has a default file location set in the mandatory profile. Presume it will be the same for excel, etc. It's not been set by the Office 2003 GPO so I must have saved it into the profile by accident.

 

The only way I can think of to fix this is to edit the mandatory profile and remove as many references to default file locations in Office applications that I can find. The main issue with this is that I am worried that I will mess something else up during the editing.

 

I doubt there's anyone out there who can help with this in some way that I haven't thought of, but I thought it was worth a try....

 

I am very definitely out of my depth and sinking fast

[3s-gtech]

In my experience (and I have a fair bit with mandatory profiles) editing them manually in Regedit is pretty straightforward. Make a backup of your .man first. Then open the file (Load Hive) while it's not in use by anyone. Do a search for the incorrect settings. You can delete the entries that conflict with your GPs, or edit them - they'll get set one way or another. Then, test it! I have successfully refined XP and 7 profiles this way, with the result being fast and stable logons (of course, it'll all blow up tomorrow as I'm not there, but such is IT).

[Andie]

In my experience (and I have a fair bit with mandatory profiles) editing them manually in Regedit is pretty straightforward. Make a backup of your .man first. Then open the file (Load Hive) while it's not in use by anyone. Do a search for the incorrect settings. You can delete the entries that conflict with your GPs, or edit them - they'll get set one way or another. Then, test it! I have successfully refined XP and 7 profiles this way, with the result being fast and stable logons (of course, it'll all blow up tomorrow as I'm not there, but such is IT).

 

Thanks. I didn't realise I could try and do it this way. Though I may need more detailed instructions to do it safely - only ever done one load hive before. Main issue is working out a safe time to do this within my working hours (ie. when no one is logged in to it). But thanks for giving me hope that I may be able to reliably fix this.

[stebo730]

Copy the Mandatory Profile and rename it - assign this to a test User and then just edit the copied version. Once you are happy you can rename the current Mandatory Profile mandatory.old or something and rename the new edited one to the proper name. This way you can then always go back if things fail and you don't need to disturb any users while you are working on the profile.

[3s-gtech]

Thanks. I didn't realise I could try and do it this way. Though I may need more detailed instructions to do it safely - only ever done one load hive before. Main issue is working out a safe time to do this within my working hours (ie. when no one is logged in to it). But thanks for giving me hope that I may be able to reliably fix this.

 

I forgot the only other important step - remember to Unload the hive when you have finished editing it. Give me a PM if you get stuck.

[Andie]

Copy the Mandatory Profile and rename it - assign this to a test User and then just edit the copied version. Once you are happy you can rename the current Mandatory Profile mandatory.old or something and rename the new edited one to the proper name. This way you can then always go back if things fail and you don't need to disturb any users while you are working on the profile.

 

Unfortunately, that's how I normally do it, obviously not carefully enough. It seems most of the time I fix one issue to find that something else is broken.