"Documents and Settings"

[Guest]

I've been to many site and newsgroups that try to explain the variou
entries in "Documents and Settings". There's Administrator, Administrator.ComputerName
Administrator.ComputerName.000, All Users, All Users.Windows, MyName, MyName.ComputerName

What are all these profiles? I didn't create them. How do I make sense of all these
Thank

 

[Ray at]

I've never seen allusers.windows.

When you log onto a computer jsmith for the first time, a jsmith directory
is created for your user account. But, what if your computer is a member of
a domain that is in a forest with multiple domains all trusting each other?
There could be a jsmith in every domain. So, if another jsmith logs on from
a different domain, a jsmith directory cannot be created for that user (or
used), since it belongs to the first jsmith that logged on. So, it gets
jsmith.domainname. If jsmith from a domain is the first jsmith to logon,
and then a local account of jsmith logs on, that directory name will be
jsmith.computername, since the local computer is the "domain" for all
intents and purposes.

As far as the .000, .001, etc., I've only seen that happen when the local
profile that already exists for a user cannot be loaded for one reason or
another (corruption or something), so the computer has to create a new
profile for the person. Since there's already a directory for
username.domainname, it starts numbering new profile directories as needed.

Ray at home