migrating roaming profiles from NT to XP

[Bianca]

I have roaming profiles that use to reside on NT
workstations and are now logging onto new XP workstations.
When the user logs in they lose options in some quick
launch options in the start menu, outlook access, the
ability to connect to network printers and in general, the
ability to write to local disk. If I make the user admin
of the local computer they see it again. This is not an
option. If I create a new profile that has never logged on
to an NT workstation they work fine in the XP environment.
Something about the multi operating environment is
corrupting the profiles. I do not want to make 50 new
profiles. My XP's have all recent patches installed. My XP
stations have all recent patches installed. Does anyone
have a fix. Thanks. B

 

[Roger Abell]

I do not believe this is a matter of corrupt profiles.
Rather you are seeing the effects of XP being by default
a much more well secured environment than NT.

Hence, your profiles expect to see things where, and to
be able to assess then as, things are in NT.
It in many ways is not so in XP.

Users members do not by default have write access in
many areas where they did in NT. A new profile may
be created and evolved sensitive to these differences.
An existing one expects things to be as they were.

Instead of creating new profiles and forcing your users
through the accompanying pain you could use tools like
filemon and regmon from www.sysinternals.com to monitor
some accounts' usages to see where you need to grant Users
change/modify. At the end of that road, you would need to
check version differences, such as for OE, to account for
more (of the remaining) behavior differences.

You could look into whether the files and settings transfer
wizard handles NT4, and then import into new profiles as
another possible alternative.