Roaming Profiles with windows 7

[ybnissle]

It is not saving the user.dat file properly therefore app data is not folloing the users as well as other settings.  Is there a patch??

[JoeX51]

what is happening?

[ybnissle]

I never messed with Vista too much(thank god) but it seems that our good friends at Microsoft have decided that Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 use version 1 of the profile formatting. Windows Vista and up use Version 2 of profile formatting. There are differences between V1 and V2 profile formatting (not sure what yet) but they are not compatible. I have not found any type of “version upgrade” utility.

What happens is that when a user first logs onto a Windows 7 machine, it will create another copy of the profile on the server. The new profile will be named “username.V2”. In playing around with a student account on Friday, if you edit the user properties in AD to reflect the roaming profile to have a .V2 on it (\\server\profiles$\username.v2), when you log on again, it will create another copy of the profile named “username.V2.V2”. So, you do not need to update any account profile settings. If you delete the original account profile, it will create the new profile with the username.V2 format. I did not try logging back onto an XP machine to see if the profile would stay updated/synched. But from what I have read so far (just a few things), the OS will determine what profile gets used. I know that Microsoft has the USMT (user state migration tool) but I have not used it as of yet. I little scared LOL. I have 600 users and 1100 PC's and i am in a good rythm in my roll out.

I will look more into this when I get time. If for some reason we will need to store two versions of roaming profiles, it may take up server disk space if users are keeping folders on their desktops.  Migrations. Always fun huh!

[Melinda11]

Did Active Directory Users and Computers, the place where you conjure up new accounts, not give you a warning about being unable to create the profile at the time of creating the new user? The AD server will need permissions to access the same share (\\server\profiles\) in order to create the subfolder with the user's name.

If the folder is created automagically through ADU&C then the permissions for the folder will need verifying to ensure that user can access it. On the client desktop, logged in as UserName, use Explorer to access \\server\profiles\UserName and see if it allowed you to. This is usually a good indication of whether the permissions are right. If not, go down one level to \\server\profiles and see if that's accessible.

While it logical to assume that Windows 2008 is just the new Windows 2003 and Windows 7 the new Windows XP bear in mind that Microsoft are forever tightening security holes in their operating systems - so what was once a laps setup on 2003 may be more locked down on 2008 and therefore not "just work" anymore.