I Did Not Expect the Wilderness to be so ... Wild

User Profiles
Published Feb 28, 2011 Updated Sep 6, 2011

I was reminded of this movie quote when I stumbled across the following cry for help in a developer’s forum:

Whenever I connect to customer site with Citrix Xenapp it takes me around 15-20 minutes for the Remote Desktop Prompt to come up, while for other users it’s almost immediate. My connection is faster than theirs(25/4mbps). What is Citrix XenApp doing that’s taking mine so long - any guesses?
The IT person at the customer site, said it’s because my profile is over 1gb. What is “my profile”? They haven’t been able to tell me that. They said I should “clear stuff off my desktop”. Whenever I clear my things off the desktop at the customer site, it comes back the next time I login - like undeletes. Are they talking about desktop on their server, or on my local machine?

You probably now think: “Wow, that guy has a 1 GIGAbyte user profile. Unbelievable. That must be the largest profile in the world.”

Seriously, I doubt it is. With user profiles being a sadly neglected topic in the Windows world, even gross misconfigurations are bound to happen en masse. Just the other day, when I was presenting to experts in a large IT company, the guys laughed at me when I said that PC user profiles ofter are several gigabytes in size. Then I made them look up their own profile’s size. They could not believe they had around 40 GB in there - each.

If you wonder what those gigabytes might consist of: use this script to analyze your user profiles.

And if you are planning a migration and want a clean start without losing valuable data have a look at Profile Migrator.

P.S.: I am pretty sure the title quote is either from “Up” or from “Madagascar”, but I could not find a reference anywhere on the web.

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