What causes corrupt profiles?

[ctark]

One of the problems we have at my work is when a user logs on they get a red x on the network icon, but it isn't a network issue. When this happens the computer is almost unusable. You cant use things like windows explorer, or internet explorer. We know how to fix the issue, which is deleting the usrclass.dat file in the users profile. It has been suggested that SCCM could be causing the issue but i don't know. Has anybody else ran into this issue on a Windows 7 enterprise environment? I've tried googling the issue but some of the stuff is way over my head, and I dont know much about SCCM and if that is causing the issue.

 

[DigDog]

copy+paste is reputed to be the leading cause of corrupt profiles; you might want to watch out for that.

 

[dmanning963]

Sorry to resurrect this thread, but in our school district and we are seeing the same problem, but not just related to PC's imaged via SCCM. Even one we installed from DVD started doing this as well. CTark if you were able to fix the issue please post what you guys did to resolve the problem.

 

[KB]

Do you use roaming profiles? I have seen an significant uptick in corrupt profiles when the profiles are roaming (stored on a network drive). If its just one PC, it can be caused by a failing hard drive. Good luck.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Yeah, where's Daddy's reimaging thumb drive...

 

[dmanning963]

Do you use roaming profiles? I have seen an significant uptick in corrupt profiles when the profiles are roaming (stored on a network drive). If its just one PC, it can be caused by a failing hard drive. Good luck.

We use Folder Redirection (GPO) to DFS for just My Documents and Favorites. AppData stays on the local machine. See picture below, only highlighted items are redirected to the DFS.

 

[dmanning963]

We noticed that in the event log the file in question seems to have two backslashes in the path ... could this be the cause I wonder?

C:\Users\95142\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\\UsrClass.dat