Remove domain user account from local machine

[Mister.Fred.Ma]

I have a local admin account on a laptop. I have also used that
machine to logon to a nonadmin domain account. Unforunately, the user
name for the domain account is the same as the user name for the local
admin account. This has caused some strange behaviour in some
applications e.g. Cygwin. There are file permission anomalies, among
others.

To solve this, I created another local admin account. I will remove
the original local admin account, but I want to remove any vestige of
the identically named domain account first. I thought it might be as
simple as using ControlPanel->Users, but the domain account doesn't
even show up there, neither under the Users tab nor under Advanced tab
(Advanced button).

Note that I am not at the same site as the domain which the domain
account belongs to. Despite this, I can still log onto the laptop
using the domain account. So it must cache the domain authentication
info.

How can I erase everything associated with the domain account?

Is it advisable to do that, followed by erasing the identically named
local admin account, as I was intending to do? Is this the most
advisable way to resolve the name conflict?

What complications might lie ahead due to changing the local admin
account i.e. erase the old one?

Thanks.

 

[Guest]

I have a local admin account on a laptop. I have also used that
machine to logon to a nonadmin domain account. Unforunately, the user
name for the domain account is the same as the user name for the local
admin account. This has caused some strange behaviour in some
applications e.g. Cygwin. There are file permission anomalies, among
others.

How sure are you that the problems you are experiencing are being
caused by the duplicate account names? It seems highly unlikely to me,
other than for extremely poorly coded applications, as Windows (and
thus any app that uses proper Windows calls) identifies accounts not
by name but by a unique identifier (GUID).

To solve this, I created another local admin account. I will remove
the original local admin account, but I want to remove any vestige of
the identically named domain account first. I thought it might be as
simple as using ControlPanel->Users, but the domain account doesn't
even show up there, neither under the Users tab nor under Advanced tab
(Advanced button).

To delete the cached profile for the domain account:
Control Panel > System > Advanced > User Profiles\Settings then select
the account and click the delete button.
Even if this actually helps solve your problem it is only a short-term
solution as the next time you log on to the domain with that account
Widows will build it a new profile.

Note that I am not at the same site as the domain which the domain
account belongs to. Despite this, I can still log onto the laptop
using the domain account. So it must cache the domain authentication
info.

XP caches your domain password, well not quite as this would be one
big security hole but from a layman's POV that's how it appears. This
is by design otherwise users with domain accounts (ie the majority of
corporate users) would have a bit of a problem working offline.

How can I erase everything associated with the domain account?

Is it advisable to do that, followed by erasing the identically named
local admin account, as I was intending to do? Is this the most
advisable way to resolve the name conflict?

What complications might lie ahead due to changing the local admin
account i.e. erase the old one?

Potential data loss as Windows will delete the profile for that
account including it's Documents and Settings folder. Aside from that
the only other complication I can see is that it may well not solve
the problem.

 

[Mister.Fred.Ma]

How sure are you that the problems you are experiencing are being
caused by the duplicate account names? It seems highly unlikely to me,
other than for extremely poorly coded applications, as Windows (and
thus any app that uses proper Windows calls) identifies accounts not
by name but by a unique identifier (GUID).




To delete the cached profile for the domain account:
Control Panel > System > Advanced > User Profiles\Settings then select
the account and click the delete button.
Even if this actually helps solve your problem it is only a short-term
solution as the next time you log on to the domain with that account
Widows will build it a new profile.




XP caches your domain password, well not quite as this would be one
big security hole but from a layman's POV that's how it appears. This
is by design otherwise users with domain accounts (ie the majority of
corporate users) would have a bit of a problem working offline.






Potential data loss as Windows will delete the profile for that
account including it's Documents and Settings folder. Aside from that
the only other complication I can see is that it may well not solve
the problem.

Thank you for the advice. I will be giving it a shot within the next
week.

Fred

 

[Mister.Fred.Ma]

I neglected to address your question of whether I was sure that the
problems experienced were due to duplicate user names on different
domains. I'm not entirely sure that all the problems are, but cygwin
for sure uses the same user directory for 2 accounts having the same
user ID, but different domains. If you use cygwin to copy/create
files within you user file tree, you might have a file tree that
contains files from 2 different users (same user ID, different
domains).

 

[Mister.Fred.Ma]

I neglected to address your question of whether I was sure that the
problems experienced were due to duplicate user names on different
domains. I'm not entirely sure that all the problems are, but
cygwin for sure uses the same user directory for 2 accounts having
the same user ID, but different domains. If you use cygwin to
copy/create files within you user file tree, you might have a file
tree that contains files from 2 different users (same user ID,
different domains).

Also, you mentioned that erasing the cached info for the domain
account is only a temporary solution, since it is recreated upon next
logging in. That is in fact the reason why I want to rename the local
admin account so as to have a different user ID from the domain
account.