In the past few months, we have had a horrible time keeping our workers from
going places online and downloading things they shouldn't. Since we are on a
very limited budget, we have been searching for some free way to keep users
from doing this. Probably one of the simplest ways is of course to change
the users from the Administrator group to being in the User group only. We
could not do this before because of poorly written applications that would
not run if we did this. However, now all of our apps are up to speed. So we
have began changing some of our problem users over to limited users. This
works to keep them from installing things, however, it has been causing some
weird problems:

i.e.

Windows has seemingly "forgotten" some users password to login. When they
type in their password, it won't recognize it and I have to log in as Admin
and change their password in order for it to work.

Also, some user accounts themselves have seemingly disappeared as well.
Their user name is gone from the users list.

Another thing is that their computer seem to not run exactly right on a
day-to-day basis. Somedays it will work great, others it throws errors
galore at us.

Is this possibly because we started them out as part of the Administrator
Group and then demoted them to User Group only? If not, what could be
causing these problems?

Thank you in advance for any help provided.

Jonathan Hardy
University of Georgia
Food Service
Computer Support

Many of the problems that older apps cause when run in Limited User
environments are related to file permissions problems. Program folders are
set to Read only for Users group. You may need to change permissions to allow
Write (for INI files, cfg files, etc, but not EXE or DLL files.)

"jhardy66" wrote:

> In the past few months, we have had a horrible time keeping our workers from
> going places online and downloading things they shouldn't. Since we are on a
> very limited budget, we have been searching for some free way to keep users
> from doing this. Probably one of the simplest ways is of course to change
> the users from the Administrator group to being in the User group only. We
> could not do this before because of poorly written applications that would
> not run if we did this. However, now all of our apps are up to speed. So we
> have began changing some of our problem users over to limited users. This
> works to keep them from installing things, however, it has been causing some
> weird problems:
>
> i.e.
>
> Windows has seemingly "forgotten" some users password to login. When they
> type in their password, it won't recognize it and I have to log in as Admin
> and change their password in order for it to work.
>
> Also, some user accounts themselves have seemingly disappeared as well.
> Their user name is gone from the users list.
>
> Another thing is that their computer seem to not run exactly right on a
> day-to-day basis. Somedays it will work great, others it throws errors
> galore at us.
>
> Is this possibly because we started them out as part of the Administrator
> Group and then demoted them to User Group only? If not, what could be
> causing these problems?
>
> Thank you in advance for any help provided.
>
> Jonathan Hardy
> University of Georgia
> Food Service
> Computer Support

My problem is not the apps anymore...that problem has been taken care of. My
problem is that I can't figure out why my users' profiles are doing so many
wierd things. Is it possibly because they started out as members of the
Administrators group and then got demoted?

Thank you for your help.

Jonathan Hardy
University of Georgia
Food Service
Computer Support


"techguru100 (A+)" wrote:

> Many of the problems that older apps cause when run in Limited User
> environments are related to file permissions problems. Program folders are
> set to Read only for Users group. You may need to change permissions to allow
> Write (for INI files, cfg files, etc, but not EXE or DLL files.)

The user profiles in question may be damaged, their registry hives may have
dead entries, or their registry hives may be too full.
You may need to delete their user profiles in System Properties>Advanced
Tab> User Profiles Settings button.
Be sure to back up their documents before you do this though!

"jhardy66" wrote:

> My problem is not the apps anymore...that problem has been taken care of. My
> problem is that I can't figure out why my users' profiles are doing so many
> wierd things. Is it possibly because they started out as members of the
> Administrators group and then got demoted?
>
> Thank you for your help.
>
> Jonathan Hardy
> University of Georgia
> Food Service
> Computer Support
>
>
> "techguru100 (A+)" wrote:
>
> > Many of the problems that older apps cause when run in Limited User
> > environments are related to file permissions problems. Program folders are
> > set to Read only for Users group. You may need to change permissions to allow
> > Write (for INI files, cfg files, etc, but not EXE or DLL files.)
>

I have ultimately had to do this. The only way I could fix this problem was
to create a new user and delete their old. However, My original question
still stands...does anyoine know why they did? I guess what I am really
trying to find out is if demoting a user from the Administrative Groupd to
the User Group only is a probable cause for the corruption of these user
profiles?

Thank you for all of your help.

Jonathan Hardy
University of Georgia
Food Service
Computer Support

"techguru100 (A+)" wrote:

> The user profiles in question may be damaged, their registry hives may have
> dead entries, or their registry hives may be too full.
> You may need to delete their user profiles in System Properties>Advanced
> Tab> User Profiles Settings button.
> Be sure to back up their documents before you do this though!
>
> "jhardy66" wrote:
>
> > My problem is not the apps anymore...that problem has been taken care of. My
> > problem is that I can't figure out why my users' profiles are doing so many
> > wierd things. Is it possibly because they started out as members of the
> > Administrators group and then got demoted?
> >
> > Thank you for your help.
> >
> > Jonathan Hardy
> > University of Georgia
> > Food Service
> > Computer Support
> >
> >
> > "techguru100 (A+)" wrote:
> >
> > > Many of the problems that older apps cause when run in Limited User
> > > environments are related to file permissions problems. Program folders are
> > > set to Read only for Users group. You may need to change permissions to allow
> > > Write (for INI files, cfg files, etc, but not EXE or DLL files.)
> >