Windows 7 Profile Woes

Back in the days of good old Windows XP there was three ways of assigning a profile to your users:

1. Roaming Profiles


2. Mandatory Profiles


3. A Default Profile stored in NETLOGON

I always chose to use the shared Default profile method but when changing to Windows 7, wiered things started to happen...

Every time a user logged on, they would receive a notification balloon informing them that they had been logged on with a temporary profile and accompanied by a message that my users found quite scary since it mentioned that none of their work would be saved! Whilst this was happening I was also experiencing a problem where folder re-direction would fail every other time that a user logged into a machine. This was particularly annoying!

So where to start?

I decided that the temporary profile warning must be because of using the default profile method above. The obvious thing to do then was switch to a different method with mandatory profiles being the most obvious. However, Microsoft decided that, as of Vista, it would make the production of mandatory profiles a pain in the arse. To find out how bad it is, see the Technet guide.

I spent a whole day building a nice fresh Windows 7 virtual machine so that I could create the mandatory profile. I followed the instructions to the letter only to have it not work! Onto roaming profiles then.

It was now time to experience a roaming profile problem. Despite activating a roaming profile for a user, I was still receiving the temporary profile warning and the profile directory did not contain anything. It trned out that there was some old profile information being left somewhere. To delete this old data I discovered a VBScript that basically does the same job as delprof.exe (which doesn't work for Vista or Windows 7).

Next it was onto the randomness of the folder re-direction failing to apply every other time somebody logged on. I eventually found an event log entry that mentioned that the 'logon optimization policy' was preventing folder-redirection from working. That's right... Windows optomized the logon by turning all the useful stuff off!

I eventually discovered that this was to do with a change in the way Windows performs 'asynchronous processing and logon optomization'. Long story short... enabling the 'always wait for the network at computer startup and logon' GPO setting immediately cured the problem!

So to summarise... turn on roaming profiles and enable the 'always wait for the network at computer startup and logon' GPO and your life will be much easier!