Recreating Profiles breaks start menu

[michaeljbrewis97]

Hi all,

 

I have had a strange issue for the past few weeks and it has taken a while to find out the cause. Basically users were randomly having an issue where if they pressed the start menu they were presented with a Critical Error message and informing them to log off to sort the issue.

 

The only resolution I have found is to completely reimage the pc in order to allow the user to be able to use the Start Menu again.

 

The cause I have found was due to local profiles stored on the PC deleting after a period of them not being used. We used DelProf2 which was set to delete profiles on the machine after 5 days. This was causing the issue.

 

I have removed delprof from running, but am now faced with the issue of computer hard drives getting full due to the amount of user profiles and them not being cleared up.

 

Has anyone else had this issue or know what I can do to fix it?

 

I have tried Microsoft support page where it said to do some thing in powershell to rebuild the start menu - but this didn’t work.

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[3s-gtech]

Yes, I’ve had this on a local admin profile. Deleting that profile, then logging in again, fixed it.

 

You can use Group Policy to delete profiles over a certain age. It’s a sledgehammer and if you apply it wrong, you could wipe a user’s locally stored documents if they have them. Otherwise, it works fine.

[michaeljbrewis97]

I tried that but still get the critical error message appear. Might try npt using DelProf and see if the GPO of delting profiles of a certain age works better. But will test it on a few machines as a test

[BOOT]

DelProf2 has never worked on Windows 10.

There's much more to user profiles than just a folder.