User Profiles

I came across this problem while preparing my sessions for this year’s conferences. The setup is boringly simple: a user with a roaming profile logging on to a Windows 10 machine. The interesting part: every second time, loading the roaming profile would fail - causing a 35 second logon delay. Every other time, it would work.

Microsoft just announced a new service called Enterprise State Roaming. The broader goal seems to be to replace roaming user profiles. That, however, is not going to happen any time soon.

This is a guest post by Bryan Chriscoli, who implemented an innovative alternative to folder redirection with the help of symbolic links, AppSense products and PowerShell scripting. All credit goes to him.

Imagine you need to determine the size of a directory, but you do not have access to it and cannot change the permissions, either. Such a situation is common with Windows user profiles. This article shows how to deal with it.

This article is part of Helge’s Profile Toolkit, a set of posts explaining the knowledge and tools required to tame Windows user profiles. As you may be aware Citrix Profile Management (aka UPM) automatically migrates existing roaming or local user profiles to its user store. A very nice feature, certainly, but what about the way back? That is the gist of a question I received today and would like to answer here.

This article is part of Helge’s Profile Toolkit, a set of posts explaining the knowledge and tools required to tame Windows user profiles. Many errors related to user profiles result in the user getting a temporary profile instead of the regular local or roaming profile. I have written about possible causes for that here. In addition to that, there is an entirely different category of errors that occur when even a temporary profile cannot be created. This article describes likely causes.

Ron Kuper asked in a comment why the architecture of Citrix Profile Management was changed from being based on mandatory profiles to capturing the entire profile content by default. This change happened between versions 1 and 2.

In this article I explain how to create a template for Microsoft User Experience Virtualization. For details on how UE-V works please see my earlier article Microsoft User Experience Virtualization (UE-V): Facts and Review. As a sample application I used my permission management tool SetACL Studio.

16 years after roaming profiles made their debut in Windows NT 4.0 Microsoft takes another stab at synchronizing user settings across devices - a very different one. As we will see, UE-V is radically different from roaming profiles, but so similar to some other user environment management products that it seems like a best-practices implementation.

This article is part of Helge’s Profile Toolkit, a set of posts explaining the knowledge and tools required to tame Windows user profiles. Setting up a network share on a file server for hosting user profiles is not too difficult if you follow the steps outlined in this article. The recommendations I give here apply to both Windows roaming profiles and Citrix Profile Management (UPM) profiles.

This article is part of Helge’s Profile Toolkit, a set of posts explaining the knowledge and tools required to tame Windows user profiles. Administrators frequently have the requirement to adapt newly created user profiles to corporate standards. This is typically done by modifying the default profile, the profile Windows uses as a template when creating new user profiles during logon.

This article is part of Helge’s Profile Toolkit, a set of posts explaining the knowledge and tools required to tame Windows user profiles. Nobody wants a temporary profile. So why do I get one? Here are the most common reasons for Windows to only issue a profile that is deleted at logoff instead of the regular local or roaming user profile.

This article is part of Helge’s Profile Toolkit, a set of posts explaining the knowledge and tools required to tame Windows user profiles. One of the problems inherent to roaming user profiles is that they are copied to the local computer during logon. That takes time. Hence the motivation to limit the size of user profiles. One way of doing that is to put a quota on them, another one is folder redirection. Although widely used, redirection has its problems; problems so grave that Shawn Bass started to campaign against using folder redirection altogether. In this article I describe why Shawn despises redirection, which alternatives are available now what we can hope for in the future.

Helge’s Profile Toolkit is a collection of tips, tricks and tools for working with user profiles. The Profile Toolkit This article is just an appetizer - the entire kit is spread across the following posts on this site:

From time to time I get asked about the differences between Citrix’s and Immidio’s profile management products. Here are some common questions along with my answers. Can the product be used to provide a single profile on multiple platforms? Citrix Profile Management 3.x does not have cross-platform capabilities built in. That means you cannot use an XP profile on Windows 7, but you can use the same profile on 32 and 64 bit Windows, if you dare. Citrix has a beta version of PM with cross-platform support for MS Office and Internet Explorer. Flex Profiles does not have true cross-platform capabilities either, but it can be used to make settings available cross-platform that have the same format on all platforms. Example: HKCU\Software\Paint.NET is probably a no-brainer whereas copying HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer around is probably a bad idea. Can the product be used on SBC, VDI and fat clients? This is true for both Citrix PM and Flex Profiles (licensing restrictions may apply). Can the product be used to preconfigure a user’s environment? Both Citrix Profile Management and Immidio Flex Profiles are classic profile management products without the capability to set up a specific user environment or distribute updated settings to all users. That is typically referred to as “user environment management” and two free implementations are Microsoft’s Group Policy Preferences and Pierre Marmignon’s Virtual User Environment Manager. Of course there are many alternatives by companies like AppSense or RES. Can portions of the profile be saved during a session as well as at logoff and at disconnects? Citrix Profile Management loads (respectively streams) the profile at logon and writes changes back at logoff. It also has a feature called “active write back” which, if enabled, causes changed files to be written back to the user store immediately. This works for files only, not for registry keys. Flex Profiles typically is configured to import settings at logon and export again at logoff. Since Flex uses a simple tool for the imports/exports it is conceivable to call that tool during a session as well. There is, however, no built-in support for that. Neither is there for exporting settings at disconnects. Can it be configured what to save and what not? Both products are very flexible when it comes to which parts of the profile should be saved. Yet there is one major difference: by default, Profile Management saves everything whereas Flex Profiles saves nothing. As a consequence, PM just works out of the box whereas Flex needs to be configured for each application individually.

This article is part of Helge’s Profile Toolkit, a set of posts explaining the knowledge and tools required to tame Windows user profiles. One of the constants in the Windows universe is the knowledge that user profiles increase in size over time. They tend to accumulate all kinds of junk and become bloated which is especially cumbersome in the case of roaming profiles because all that “weight” is copied across the network time and again, slowing down the logon process.

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?

This article is part of Helge’s Profile Toolkit, a set of posts explaining the knowledge and tools required to tame Windows user profiles. Mandatory profiles are generally considered fast and secure because they usually are small in size and cannot be modified by the user. While that is true – mandatory profiles stay pristine indefinitely – there is more to security than read-only access.

This article is part of Helge’s Profile Toolkit, a set of posts explaining the knowledge and tools required to tame Windows user profiles. This article presents a collection of tips and tricks around user state migration with and without Microsoft’s USMT. I originally compiled this material for my presentation at the 2010 TechDay Online.

This article is part of Helge’s Profile Toolkit, a set of posts explaining the knowledge and tools required to tame Windows user profiles. More and more people are upgrading to a 64-bit version of Windows. Many of them would probably like to keep their existing configuration. The question is: can you use the 32-bit profile on Windows x64? Is there even such a thing as a 32-bit or a 64-bit user profile? Or are profiles independent of the system’s bitness?

Here is the slide deck for my presentation User profiles inside out from PubForum Berlin 2010. Enjoy.

This article is part of Helge’s Profile Toolkit, a set of posts explaining the knowledge and tools required to tame Windows user profiles. When administrators migrate user accounts between domains, they typically re-ACL those server resources users have access to. In plain English: they copy or move the permissions from the accounts of the old domain to the corresponding accounts of the new domain. There are various ways to do that. In this article, I present a simple way to re-ACL roaming user profiles.

This article is part of Helge’s Profile Toolkit, a set of posts explaining the knowledge and tools required to tame Windows user profiles. Redirecting AppData from the user profile to a folder on the network may significantly improve logon speed. Is enabling AppData redirection a no-brainer, then? Not really, because it often comes at a price: performance.

Going to Windows 7 or Server 2008 (R2) means trouble. Let me use an analogy to explain why. You are in charge of moving people from their old houses to shiny new buildings. You have planned everything perfectly. The new homes are beautiful and located in a great neighborhood. But still, after moving house, people start to complain. They do not feel at home. You forgot to take all those seemingly unimportant things that make a house a home: pictures, plants, all sorts of personal stuff. Impossible, you say? People would never leave their personal belongings behind? I agree: when it comes to moving house, not taking at least most of the personal stuff is highly unlikely. But in IT it is common practice.