Article:		Working with Roaming User Profiles
Subject:		Roaming profiles
Date:		2005-06-22 01:51:43
From:		Fiddler
Hello, Having read your rather excellent document on creating roaming profiles, I have a small question. With a profile size limit of 10MB I find the NTUSER.DAT file has steadily grown to 6656K. Is there any way of reducing the size of this file. Cookies, history, temp internet files etc have been deleted but the size is never reduced. Many thanks Fiddler

Showing messages 1 through 3 of 3.

• Roaming profiles
  2006-04-08 14:07:13  Danny_kay [View]
  
  
  Hello,
  
  NTUSER.DAT conatains all your user settings e.g. which background to use, what software settings you use, items pinned to the start menu etc.
  
  To keep this down why not try renaming the default ntuser.dat file to ntuser.man. This will stop the file size growing.
  
  The only problem is that this won't retain any personalised settings. It will keep you working with the standard default user profile at all times even when the user changes a setting. It is almost like a read only profile.
  
  I haven't fully tested this yet but it may also be useful to prevent non administrator users installing certain per user applications too, as not only then would they not be able to write to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE but in theory they couldnt write to HKEY_CURRENT_USER. And even if the software does install most likely it wouldn't work once the registry edits that the setup has made have been deleted.
  
  Hope this helps, not sure if it would suit all environments though.
  
  Daniel Kay
• Roaming profiles
  2006-04-08 14:41:52  Danny_kay [View]
  
  
  You need to also redirect all documents, desktop folder etc because it wont copy the files to your roaming profile on log off. This means say for example I place a new bitmap on the desktop and logged off and logged back on the bitmap will have been deleted. Another good space saving technique!
  
  The only other slightly annoying thing for the end user may be the inability of saving favourites as they would be deleted upon logoff. As would the user account history, cookies etc. So if you were to use things you might want to find other ways of tracking their activities (especially internet).
  
  If you have a lot of software this may mean that the ntuser.dat file increases to store the different settings for each of them and using this method may reset them each time. For example if a program runs a wizard the first time it is ran and was not run when making the default roaming user profile then the program would repeatedly ask you to complete this wizard the first time the user uses this program on each log on. e.g. without logging off the wizard can be run once and the program used repeatedly without the wizard running again. However as soon as the user loggs off and tries to run the program again the wizard would run again.
  
  It may cause more trouble then it is worth but if you cant increase the profile limit then it may be worth considering especially if security is a concern.
• Roaming profiles
  2006-04-12 03:13:03  123mayank [View]
  
  
  my roaming and mandotry profile are not working properly in windows 2000 server and windows 2003 server