Desktop.ini and user profile logon speed

[matthewfarnell]

hi this is just a quick publish on a problem we came up against and solved, incase anyone has the same issue.

From windows 7 Microsoft have some bizar method of naming for users documents when storing on a file server.

It creates a file called desktop.ini in the users documents and from the moment this is done, their folder will only show as "Documents". Not by the name you define in AD.

To combat this we discussed with some other local schools and they had set a script to delete all desktop.ini files on the file server, and schedule it so any new users it will catch and correct.

Jump forward 5 years to Windows 10. We are now looking at changing our profile system. We realised that after a period of time the users login became slow. Not directly after it had been created but shortly after.

We tested taking the users directory to another server, this worked. we took the directory to the c drive of the file server and that worked. We rebuilt the server and re added the user documents drive and that worked fine.

We thought we'd fixed it. We thought it may be a formatting issue or an access issue. Then all of a sudden it started again. So we back tracked everything we had done to the new server to get it up and running.

Volume shadow copy, permissions, and desktop.ini removal script.

 

So we added a new drive, and applied each of the above in turn, until we found out it was the desktop.ini removal script. A users profile will struggle to build if it fails to see the desktop.ini file. Thus causing a 2 minuet addition to our logon times.

I post this because so many of our local schools copied each others method for windows 7 profiling and may encounter this issue.

Simple fix allow the desktop.ini file and if you need to find a users folder, change your field names at the top of explorer to show "filename". This shows the true folder name.

Edited March 28, 2019 by matthewfarnell

[sted]

or a better fix instead of redirecting user docs to \\server\share\username redirect to \\server\share\username\docs \pics etc also means if you have a lot of storage taken up with pics or vids say you can redirect them to a different file server

[matthewfarnell]

We use FSM to control user quoters and also we have dedupe turned on on that disk. (Don't know if the benefit of of dedupe actually shows as available space to them in their docs tho).