Remove shortcut to users profile from the drop down in the explorer bar

[KCMD]

A colleague of mine posted this up on TechNet already but didn't much of a response, we wondered if we would get a better one from here.

 

"We have a large deployment of Windows 7 machines all managed by group policies. All users have their Documents redirected to a file server as well as their other key libraries i.e. Music, videos, pictures, downloads, favourites etc - despite this users are continually saving files into their roaming profile. What I would like to do is, remove the shortcut to a users profile from the windows address bar to try and dissuade users from saving into their profile - please see the image below;

 

 

 

I can't find any group policy settings to remove this link?"

Link to TechNet question: https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windows/en-US/ee883a08-4284-48eb-a80b-59dae04e5b03/is-it-possible-to-remove-the-shortcut-to-a-users-profile-from-the-drop-down-in-the-windows-explorer?forum=w7itproui

 

This is obviously an annoying issue with having increasingly increasing profiles and losing data if the we have to reset a profile.

[Guest obsidianpillar]

A colleague of mine posted this up on TechNet already but didn't much of a response, we wondered if we would get a better one from here.

 

"We have a large deployment of Windows 7 machines all managed by group policies. All users have their Documents redirected to a file server as well as their other key libraries i.e. Music, videos, pictures, downloads, favourites etc - despite this users are continually saving files into their roaming profile. What I would like to do is, remove the shortcut to a users profile from the windows address bar to try and dissuade users from saving into their profile - please see the image below;

 

 

[ATTACH=CONFIG]38164[/ATTACH]

 

I can't find any group policy settings to remove this link?"

Link to TechNet question: https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windows/en-US/ee883a08-4284-48eb-a80b-59dae04e5b03/is-it-possible-to-remove-the-shortcut-to-a-users-profile-from-the-drop-down-in-the-windows-explorer?forum=w7itproui

 

This is obviously an annoying issue with having increasingly increasing profiles and losing data if the we have to reset a profile.

 

Not a solution, but why don't you enforce the policy "Restrict... drives from My Computer" < Can't remember exact wording, as well as the "Exclude directories in Roaming Profile" policy and add all Folder's you don't want to be saved to? This stops users saving to C:\ and excludes the directories you don't want the user to save to within their profile, leaving the only other option to save to their redirected folder?

 

That would be my approach to solving, as I don't think there's an obvious way to remove things from within Windows other than hacking away at the registry.

 

Let me know how you get on.

 

Tom