User Profiles

Why does Windows 7 feel faster than Vista, although really it is not? Improvements to the graphics driver model (WDDM got upgraded to version 1.1) certainly add to this feeling and reduce the memory footprint of the desktop windows manager (DWM) process. Microsoft describes the changes in its Graphics Guide for Windows 7.

Sometimes it is necessary to export/import data from or into the registry for some sort of additional processing. To this end, often regedit is used to create .REG files, which store a human-readable text interpretation of the registry content. .REG files can be edited easily with any capable text editor (even Notepad), and thus are a common way of making a collection of settings available to others. By the way, importing a .REG file’s data silently is done with the following command:

This article is part of Helge’s Profile Toolkit, a set of posts explaining the knowledge and tools required to tame Windows user profiles. Roaming user profiles seems like such a good idea at first, but it causes a myriad of problems in practice. One of these problems stems from the fact that the master copy of each profile is stored on a central file share. That file share needs to be accessible over a fast connection from all machines a user is logging on to, or logons tend to become very slow. This proximity requirement is easy to meet if only one site is involved, but what if users roam between different locations, or if terminal servers are distributed across several data centers? Unfortunately, there is no easy answer to this question.

This is a collection of new knowledge base articles related to Windows user profiles. As you can see, the last two months were pretty quiet. So quiet, that you may have missed the release of the first update to Citrix User Profile Manager (UPM). The new version comes as an MSI file that either installs or upgrades to UPM 2.0.1. You can get it from 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. The easiest way to assign user profile and home directories is via group policy. But that can only be done per computer. There is no (simple) way to point different users’ directories to different file servers. So what? No problem at all, until the number of users is too large for a single file server to handle. This article discusses what can be done to spread the user load.

Among the more annoying deficiencies of roaming user profiles in terminal server farms is what came to be known as “last writer wins”. It looks like Microsoft is trying to address the issue in the upcoming next version of its operating systems. Although this is a step in the right direction, I have doubts about the effectiveness of the cure.

This is a collection of new MS KB articles related to Windows user profiles. Roaming user profiles are ignored if the network connection to the remote server that stores the roaming user profile is slow

This article is part of Helge’s Profile Toolkit, a set of posts explaining the knowledge and tools required to tame Windows user profiles. A mandatory profile is a special type of roaming profile. As with a roaming profile, a mandatory profile is copied from its network location to the local machine during logon. But during logoff, changes are not copied back. Instead, the local copy of the mandatory profile is reset to its initial state at the next logon. In essence, mandatory profiles are read-only roaming profiles. This has advantages, but also severe drawbacks.

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 tries list the dos and don’ts that need to be considered when creating a user profile design. It focuses on functionality built into Windows. Third-party solutions that replace or complement the operating system’s capabilities will be the topic of future articles.

Enter ProfileNurse - Your Skilled Profile Care ProfessionalUser profiles can be bitchy. A single misbehaving profile is bad enough, but what if you have hundreds or thousands of them? Most admins have a boatload of profiles strewn across file servers, and no way of knowing anything about them because they are lacking the management tools. That’s where ProfileNurse comes in, a free tool for offline profile management. It can not only manipulate arbitrary settings stored in profiles but also gather different kinds of information about each profile on a file server.

Commenter Steven asked in response to my article on how not to delete local user profiles for the correct way to script the deletion of user profiles. Here is how. For completeness sake I start with the manual method.

This article is part of Helge’s Profile Toolkit, a set of posts explaining the knowledge and tools required to tame Windows user profiles. Roaming user profiles tend to grow over time, which is sometimes referred to as profile bloat. In and by itself, profile growth is not a problem. Users of desktop PCs who log on the the same machine every day will not even notice that they have huge profiles ready to follow them around the network. Their locally cached copy of the roaming profile is always current. No need to fetch anything from a file server during logon.

User profile problems are among the most common support issues. It is only appropriate that Microsoft simplified the troubleshooting process over time - but forgot to port it over to Vista.

In many environments it is a common practice to delete user profiles prior to conducting tests in order to start with a clean slate. However, this may prove more difficult than anticipated.

I will make a bold statement here: corrupt user profiles are a myth. That may seem very bold indeed, with 331,000 hits on Google for “corrupt user profile” and countless admins complaining about having to deal with corrupt profiles on a daily basis.

Some time ago I wrote about a misconception so common that it might pass as an IT legend - the confusion of HKU\.Default with the default user’s registry hive. Recently I came across another interesting misapprehension. As you know, the profiles base directory (usually C:\Documents and Settings) contains not only one special sub-folder, Default User, but also All Users, whose purpose is well-known: When Explorer builds the start menu and the desktop it pulls entries both from the logged-on user’s profile and from the all users folder. That is, by the way, the reason why standard users (i.e. non-admins) cannot modify some of the icons on the desktop and in the start menu - those that reside in the All Users folder, which is writeable only for administrators.

I confess: I like group policies. They are and have always been a great way of managing computer and user settings ever since their conception and introduction with Windows 2000. Of course, at the beginning management tools were nonexistent. But we were so happy not to have to rely on NT4’s system policies any more that we did not even notice. Then came GPMC, and life started to become truly great. RSOP! Group Policy modelling! Those are great tools for every admin!

Most technical folks have stumbled across the registry hive HKEY_USERS\.Default at some point. Many of them think they know what it is used for. Interestingly, most who do are wrong.