Kerry said:
Thanks for the update. I've never used sysprep with the Shared Computer
Tookit. Let us know how it owrks out.
Well....another late (late) night up in the school computer lab last
night. I had mixed success (or mixed failure, depending on how you
want to look at it):
The hotfix for Sysprep (actually for Syssetup.dll) did take care of the
problem where the administrator account settings were being mapped to
each of the user accounts on the computer. However, there is still a
nasty interaction with the MS Shared Computer Toolkit and even this
patched version of Sysprep.
If you use the SCT to set account profile restrictions, apparently what
it does is create a "roaming" profile for each user account. This new
profile is called "<accountname>.orig". This means that upon logon, XP
is copying the account settings (NTUSER.DAT, among other stuff) to a
profile it builds on the fly, called <accountname>. This is so that if
the user of the computer messes around with settings that pertain to
the desktop, power schemes, display settings, etc -- then upon logoff
the original configuration is restored. Perfect for a shared computer.
The problem is that Syssetup.dll doesn't pay attention to the
"<accountname>.orig" profile. It just says "okay, we have a user
account, so we need to initialize it and set registry pointers to this
account". Effectively, this breaks the link between the roaming
profile functionality and the profile you had previously created with
SCT.
So the moral of the story is that if you want to deploy an image of a
computer that has the MS SCT already installed and configured -- forget
it. You have to deploy the image with the MS SCT installed -- but not
configured. As a post-cloning step, you need to set the configuration
of the SCT on each machine.
Depending on how many accounts you have and how much configuration
tweaking you need to do with the profile restriction tool, this could
be easy or it could be a lot of time. Regardless, it's very
disappointing that these two Microsoft utilities (Sysprep and SCT)
don't get along well with each other. It turned a pretty nifty 100%
ready-to-go clone image into a sort-of-manual clone exercise.
Also, as changes are made over time to the deployed machines, you can
forget about recapturing those changes as a new image for re-cloning.
Once you've turned on the SCT functionality and set up roaming profiles
there seems to be no easy way of going back. You'll have to image a
client with the pre-SCT image, build up your entire set of changes to
the client and then recapture the new image before SCT is turned on.
Of course, there is absolutely NO mention of any of this in any of the
documentation MS provides for SCT or Sysprep.
The fix to Syssetup.dll would be so trivial it is sickening. All they
have to do is add an option to sysprep.inf that says something like
[UserRoaming] and you could list the account names that have a roaming
profile. Then, Syssetup.dll could be modified so when it sees these
accounts it just resets SID and doesn't do the registry initialization.
-Chris
