NTUSER.DAT - how does it get created for users?

[kennysarmy]

When a new user to a PC logs on, how does NTUSER.DAT get created - where does the information come from?

 

And secondly when a user GPO is applied does that write updated registry settings back to NTUSER.DAT or are the registry changes applied each time just to the HKEY_CURRENT_USER key?

 

Thanks.

[3s-gtech]

When a new user to a PC logs on, how does NTUSER.DAT get created - where does the information come from?

 

And secondly when a user GPO is applied does that write updated registry settings back to NTUSER.DAT or are the registry changes applied each time just to the HKEY_CURRENT_USER key?

 

Thanks.

 

I’m not an expert, and it’s a few years since I last looked at it. The source of the file depends on your profile type, but for local it comes from your hidden ‘Default’ user profile. This is modified by sysprep, or by loading the hive into regedit and playing with it.

 

I can’t remember if GPO settings write to it. Possibly - you can make the registry changes from a GPO direct to the profile in many cases - but the GPO will override the profile settings as I believe the profile is loaded first.

[chazzy2501]

This was my impression as above, it gets copied from the "default user" from the local computer.

[kennysarmy]

So my question relates to a thread I started yesterday!

http://www.edugeek.net/forums/windows-10/223888-core-draw-issues-ntuser-dat-hkey_current_user-software-corel.html

 

I have installed Corel Draw to numerous PC's and laptops and we're getting more than occasional issues whereby users randomly cannot open Corel Draw and I was trying to understand the process around how values in HKCU are created.

 

 

Once a user has successfully logged on, is it possible to edit keys in HKCU remotely?

 

I tried to edit some keys for Corel Draw in "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Corel\CorelDRAW\23.0\IPM_CDGS" which I thought was causing the issue but on launching the program the keys reverted back to how they were before I edited them