"Recent" folders in roaming profile?

[Gerry Hickman]

I had to move a ton of profiles from two old servers to an other server
- long story, but it was very slow and made me have a good look at what
was in them.

These profiles were originally from NT4, and "Local Settings" have
always been excluded.

What amazed me was looking inside the "Recent" folder and the
"Office\Recent" folder burried in "Application Data". Lots of users had
1500-2000 *.lnk files in there! This made copying the profiles take a
long time, but also probably impacts on user log-on times.

I believe it's fairly safe to delete these files, but it really needs to
be done when the user is logged onto the local machine - not easy with
100s of users.

I looked in the KB and didn't find much info on this, except one article
claims the Windows default is 15 files!

I can't think of a possible reason a user would need over 1000 files in
their "recent" list - they don't appear on the Start menu, and the
office ones only appear if you choose "History" from the Office 2000
File Browser dialog.

An other folder that was really big was "Cookies". Aren't these things
supposed to expire eventually?

 

[NIC Student]

Have you turned on folder redirection at some point? What you describe
sounds really strange. Off the top of my head it sounds like there were
1,000's of shortcuts to temporary files from something or another.

I guess I'd try deleting the files from one user's profile manually to see
if that helps

 

[NIC Student]

We don't use roaming or redirection. There always seem to be some problems
in the long term.