appdata/registry changes with default user profile

[jjohnsoncantell]

I've been experimenting with users just having the default user profile (as opposed to our mandatory profile) which works quite well, however there are a few things I'm not too sure on. There are a couple of programs that need app data, or registry changes, for settings that weren't set while making the default profile. Could anyone suggest the best way of making these changes?

 

Thanks

[mrwoberts]

Could you provide more details...

 

How did you create your default user profile?

What do you want to happen when a user logs onto the machine?

Will that profile be erased when they log out?

Do you want pre-generated appdata to already exist in the default user profile when a new user is created?

Detail exactly what you want to happen, including the pieces of the puzzle that you don't have - what would they look like?

[jjohnsoncantell]

Thanks for your reply. I created the default user profile by setting up everything I could think of in the admin account on a clean build, then used mdt to create it from that during deployment.

 

I've been trying to eliminate some irritating problems that I've had since re-imaging in the summer and I'm pretty sure these are occurring because I am still using a mandatory profile based on a previous image. Both are windows 7 images, so it shouldn't be too much of a problem to keep the old profile, but the new one has a lot of updates. Rather than going through lengthy testing to find whether the problems are caused by the mandatory profile, I thought it would be a lot easier to remove that from the equation completely and use the new default user profile as a base to start again. Since there are very few programs that seem to need any sort of configuration, I was thinking about ditching using network stored profiles and just sticking to the default user profile.

 

Where we are currently using a forced mandatory profile, all of the changes are made in the hive or by adding/changing files in the appdata folder in the profile. Some of the changes I need to make are registry changes, which I suppose I could just push via gpo however the others are specifically files in app data folders. What will my options be if I just stick to the local default user profile? It will be removed on logoff

 

Thanks

[mrwoberts]

Let me run this past you to make sure I've understood correctly.

 

A user signs on to a domain PC using personal credentials.

A new (temp) profile is created using that PCs default ntuser.dat hive and appdata folder.

Some registry settings or appdata for specific software is 'missing', or insufficient.

You'd like to add these missing registry settings or appdata to the PC.

Once that works you'd like to roll this method out across all domain PCs so that each login is quickly created from the 'default' profile of the PC in use.

 

Assuming the above is correct there are possibly some steps I can help you with, but you may already be doing them...

 

Such as, to make changes to the default user hive I would load it into the registry, import the changes you require, then unload the hive. For example...

REG  LOAD  HKU\DefaultUser  "C:\Users\Default\ntuser.dat"
   reg  import  defaultUserSettings.reg
   reg  import  ieDefaultUserSettings.reg
   reg  import  mplayerDefaultUserSettings.reg
REG  UNLOAD  HKU\DefaultUser

 

You then have a default ntuser.dat hive that I believe is transferable.

NOTE: Your defaultUserSettings.reg files would have to point to the correct key, as in...

[HKEY_USERS\[b]DefaultUser[/b]\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\VisualEffects]
"VisualFXSetting"=dword:00000003

 

I have tried this approach in the past, but there were one or two things I couldn't achieve with this approach, to do with IE 11, and Media Player. I discovered that was because they each go through an initialisation upon first login. To get around that I put a silent .vbs script in the Default Users startup folder, which imported the REG settings then deleted itself - errors were logged and suppressed.

 

For the AppData contents, I simply copied the necessary folders to the default user profile, creating the subfolders that didn't exist... I had no problem with that part, as it was copied as expected during new user creation.

 

Am I on the right track?

[jjohnsoncantell]

You've got it pretty much spot on, im not great at explaining myself, sorry. I'll give that a try and see if that eliminates some of these problems. Thanks for your help