Roaming Profile Problem, Various Windows 7 Images

[Darylrese]

Good Morning,

 

In the summer holidays we upgraded from an old RM CC3 network to a brand new HP vanilla solution and its fantastic but we have a big problem with roaming profiles.

 

We installed 3 different Windows 7 Images onto client machines via a WDS server:

 

Staff Image - Includes all software including curriculum specificf software i.e Photoshop

 

Student Image - Office, Plugins and ICT programs

 

Admin Image - Office 2010, plugins and windows updates only

 

The problem we are having is if a user logs onto a staff imaged PC then logs onto an admin or student imaged PC, they then get stuck on the 'Welcome' screen for over an hour and the HDD is being hammered. I checked event viewer on a machine once it logged on and it reported an issue with dynamic link librarys and having to install every single one. Im guessing when that user logs on, the PC is installing all the software from the staff image as it all seems to be in the programs list once completed.

 

Is there a way of stopping this? We use roaming profiles so that users can access outlook etc anywhere in the school but this issue is causing major disruption. Also once the user has this issue, how can i reset their profile so that they can get back onto an admin machine? Is it as easy as deleting their profile from the file server? What data will they lose by doing this?

 

Hope this all makes sense and any advice welcomed. Its a huge learning curve coming from an RM system but its so much better!

 

Cheers guys!

Edited September 14, 2012 by Darylrese

[psydii]

Unless you are deploying software via the user node of your GPOs (a strongly discouraged practice) then it should not be software installation.

 

Take a look at the Event Viewer->Application and Services Logs->Microsoft->Windows->Group Policy log to see if anything reports taking a long time, or look for long gaps between events..

 

Have you got verbose messages turned on? If not turn them on, they might help narrow down the specific stage the problem occours at.

 

My guess would be a change in folder redirection policies between the machines. (there's a log for that too just befoer the GP Log), or an exepectadly large Profile folder.

 

How big are the profiles as in the c:\users\username folder? How big is the corrisponding one on the server?

Edited September 14, 2012 by psydii

[SYNACK]

Weird, it should not be able to do that unless the installers are specified in user GPO or something.

 

Is there anything stopping you from just dropping the staff image on all the student machines? Might be the quickest solution if you have the liscencing.

[Darylrese]

Thanks guys. Ill take a look and let you know my findings. The staff image contains registration and SIMS software so it is not practical to roll this out to the whole school.

 

The imaging has been a bit of a nightmare, they need completely redoing at some point. The company who put it in decided it would be better to have a big image with everything on than to install an OS and then roll out software via MSI.

[Darylrese]

Sorry for slow reply guys, things are really busy here. So after some testing we have found that this issue occurs when the PC is restarted then a user tries to logon after being on a PC with a different image. Here are the errors in event viewer...any ideas?

 

[SYNACK]

Sorry for slow reply guys, things are really busy here. So after some testing we have found that this issue occurs when the PC is restarted then a user tries to logon after being on a PC with a different image. Here are the errors in event viewer...any ideas?

 

[ATTACH=CONFIG]15254[/ATTACH][ATTACH=CONFIG]15255[/ATTACH]

 

We had this when we were adding security groups that were wrong in GPO to special groups like local administrators. There was a log file floating around somewhere that helped me pin it down but I did not document it unfortunately. I found it by searching through the event log numbers with symptoms on google though so it should be locatable.