Mysterious profile change on desktops

[Guest]

I have 4 pcs running Window 2000 pro and they all have (at different times)
lost their original profile when they log on to the network causing them to
lose access to icons and data files.

Why is this happening and how do I restore these units to their original
profile to prevent having to copy everything back over to their existing
profile?

 

[Steven L Umbach]

Are you using roaming profiles?? Is this fairly new behavior on those four
computers?? Have these users recently not been able to logon to their
computers with their domain accounts? Are these computers SP4 with current
updates applied??

They should not simply be losing their local user profiles unless the
computers have been unjoined from the domain and then joined again as I have
seen that happen where a new profile was generated after that when the
domain user logged back on again.

Your best bet is probably to copy their old profile over to their new
profile or try modifying the registry as shown in the KB article below.

Steve

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314045

 

[Guest]

Thanks for the tip. How can I tell which profile they are using? If I remove
one of the profiles and it is the wrong one I can still just transfer the
data to the existing profile to get the data back correct?

 

[Steven L Umbach]

Be careful because if you remove a profile via System
Properties-advanced/user profiles the entire contents of the user profile
will be deleted. To find which profile they are currently using use the set
command while the user is logged on as shown in the example below from my
computer. I deleted a lot of lines from the output but look for the line
USERPROFILE=.

Now having said that I have seen some really strange things when a user has
multiple profiles on a computer in that a particular application may still
be using an old profile and I have seen Outlook do that same where the .pst
file was not in the profile shown by the set command. So again be very
careful and if you delete any profiles by sure to back them up to other
media first in case the user needs something from it.

Yes you can just copy data from one user profile to another but logon as an
administrator account that is not the source or destination profile. If I
copy a profile on the same computer I generally copy everything but the
cookies folder, and the temp and temporary internet files folders under the
local settings folder. If you get some message that the profile folder can
not be copied because a .dat file is in use then reboot the computer first
and make sure the source/destination profile is not opened before the copy
operations. ALSO if EFS encryption is being used by any of your users be
sure they are backing up their EFS private keys as they are stored in the
user's profile and you could find them in a situation where they can no
longer access their EFS encrypted files and if no Recovery Agent is enabled
for that computer the files could be permanently lost.

NOTE you can use System Properties - advanced/user profiles to copy user
profiles also BUT that does NOT copy Outlook .pst and Outlook Express email
files which are in the local settings folder which most are not aware of.

Steve

D:\WINDOWS\system32>set
ALLUSERSPROFILE=D:\Documents and Settings\All Users
APPDATA=D:\Documents and Settings\Steve\Application Data
CLIENTNAME=Console
CommonProgramFiles=D:\Program Files\Common Files
COMPUTERNAME=STEVE-XP
ComSpec=D:\WINDOWS\system32\cmd.exe
USERDOMAIN=STEVE-XP
USERNAME=Steve
USERPROFILE=D:\Documents and Settings\Steve