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Windows 2000 user profiles

Zeddicus

Member
I have an issue that has come up for a few users on my companies domain network. It's not a major issue in that its only a few minutes to work around the problem, but if there is a way to fix it straight up, id like to know.

when we create a user account on our domain and the user logs on his/her pc, it creates a user profile in documents and settings for that user. a standard logon account would be something like john.doe
a user profile folder is created for john doe in documents and settings called john.doe and all his desktop/info is stored there.

now here is the issue. a few users have logged on a normal and have gotten completely different desktop profiles.

for example, john.doe logs on to the domain with his usual name and password, but get a brand new desktop with windows 200 start up screen and all.

after checking documents and settings I find that it has created a completelty new profile for john doe in a folder titled john.doe/domain and all his information is still in his old john.doe directory.

the workaround is to copy all his documents, desktop icons, favorites etc. from the old directory to the new, but im wondering if there is a way to force the system back into logging in under the old profile again.

any ideas?
 
You could always setup roaming profiles, that way even if a new one gets created it should still be the same. As for the root of your problem, I've never seen Windows create a new profile unless something changed like the ACLs on the old one didn't allow write access or the user's SID changed.
 
Are they leaving the domain and rejoining? I could swear I've seen that cause this exact problem. The first profile would be john.doe and the second (new) one would be john.doe.DOMAINNAME.
 
as far as i know they are not. as a standard practice our user accounts are only given user access rights to their own pcs, so them disjoining the domain shouldnt be possible.

ive disjoined pcs from the domain before and rejoined and never had it create a new profile, though it kind of sounds like that is what is happening.

yea, the new profile would be john.doe.domainname the / was a typo
 
Sounds like the GUID came disconnected from the the users profile. You should be able to edit it in the registry by going to regedit>HKEY_local_machine>software>Microsoft>WindowsNT>CurrentV
rsion>ProfileList in there you can find the profile that ?I think? will have something like $systemdrive$\Documents and Settings\user.001 under profileimagepath. Test it first, but I think if you remove the .001 or whatever it will connect the users ID to the old profile.
 
thanks for the suggestion. ill be remoting into the users machine that is currently have the issue in the next hour or so, so i will definately check the registry and look for that entry.
 
Originally posted by: Robor
Are they leaving the domain and rejoining? I could swear I've seen that cause this exact problem. The first profile would be john.doe and the second (new) one would be john.doe.DOMAINNAME.

the third would be john.doe.domainname.001 and so on.

You could change in registry (on the computer where the user logs on) the profile the user uses (HKEY_USERS somewhere if I remember correctly - find the user you want and change its profile path). This might be faster than moving its profile, or not - but you could access its registry remotely
 
I've only seen this happen on my manager's computer. It's like a year old, and he has like 5 different profile folders on his computer.
 
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