Mandatory profiles.. Where do I even begin?

[3s-gtech]

That is the official, default method. Never done it that way personally as it always seemed unintuative, but if you're really struggling to get it to work it's probably best to drop back to this.

[Garacesh]

Used 'Copy to..' on the default profile, logged in as a user with no GPO applied, modified the profile, restarted machine, changed NTUSER.DAT to NTUSER.MAN, made sure permissions were correct, logged in as a different user (with GPO pointing to the same profile) and it works!

 

.... ish.

 

Start menu won't open now

 

Edit: Apparently this is an issue when logging in whilst the profile is .DAT (which it needs to be to modify it). Going to have to try doing this

 

Edit2: IT WORKED!

Edited May 12, 2016 by Garacesh

[3s-gtech]

Knew you'd get there. It's worth it IMO - we like mandatory profiles because they stop our (quite small) SSDs from filling up too quickly with local profiles, and they're quick and easy to manage (you can change everyone's profiles in one step).

[Garacesh]

Knew you'd get there. It's worth it IMO - we like mandatory profiles because they stop our (quite small) SSDs from filling up too quickly with local profiles, and they're quick and easy to manage (you can change everyone's profiles in one step).

 

That's one of the reasons we use them here, plus, if the profile is already stored locally that cuts logon times significantly. (Impacts startup times a little if the profile doesn't exist, but, once the profile is there, because it's copied with /MIR, it won't keep re-downloading provided there are no changes.)