Effects of changing user account types

[Kremerica]

All,
I have a domain with about 40 user computers at work.
The client machines host the user accounts and profiles locally and they are all winXP Pro.
All the local user accounts on the machines have Administrator rights.

We needed to block someone from deleting files and doing anything to the machine because he was going to be let go.
So I went in and changed his account from the Administrator account type to a guest account.
Then went to the C drive and changed the guest account rights to deny delete, append, create and/or modify files. all I wanted him to be able to do was read files.

But, I logged out of the other Admin account, then logged into the users account and it was like I created the account brand new, the window popped up to customize settings and there were no icons that the user used to have on the desktop and the background reverted the windows default.

Did I just delete all the files related to that users account? is there a backup for this? like can I use windows system restore to revert back to yesterdays settings? will that affect group/user policies?

The user had some folders with files in them on his desktop! oops!

 

[Nothinman]

Did I just delete all the files related to that users account? is there a backup for this? like can I use windows system restore to revert back to yesterdays settings? will that affect group/user policies?

System Restore doesn't cover user data, but the old profile is most likely still in C:\Documents and Settings.

 

[Kremerica]

Yeah the folder for his profile is there, but no files in it.
I am going to try the restore, maybe it will return the files in his profile folder.

 

[RebateMonger]

Originally posted by: Kremerica
Yeah the folder for his profile is there, but no files in it.

When you log in as a Local Administrator, there's nothing in the old User's Profile? Usually it's pretty tough to lose Profiles. Windows is treating this as a new Profile, so I'd expect there to be an old Profile in Documents and Settings.

 

[Kremerica]

nope,
I logged in as local admin, changed the user account, logged out, logged in as the restricted user with the same user name & password that it was before the change. I then tried to delete something to check the policies and I couldn't, which was the intention. Then I restarted the machine and logged back in as the Admin and the restricted user's profile folder was completely gone.

After changing the profile and restarting, it didn't have the user's profile folder at all.
Then, for some reason, it wrote over the old profile with a new one after I logged back in as that restricted user.
Then logging in again as the Admin the profile folder was there but empty.

So I did the system restore and now there is the profile's original folder just named username and there is a second profile folder that is empty named username(2)...

oh well, problem solved, the files are back,

thanks for the help and replies.

the user account's profile folder was there, but it was empty after I changed the account to guest with restrictions... weird...