So I spent most of today with a colleage fixing a slight problem that was started by someone else yesterday. We went about it the wrong way and so spent most the day fixing it. The lady had a local account on the computer but someone else wanted to use it, and at work, you can have users login through the domain. Since they wanted to do this, it was set up yesterday so she had the proper account being the domain server account. She came into work this morning and came straight up to IT wondering where all her files were. Since creating the new user, a new profile was created and everything was gone. So to recover this, there are two ways, one works better than the other, we of course did the more stupid method which was the first one to come to mind. The better method took some searching.
The proper or better method, is to head into registry and navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE>SOFTWARE>Microsoft>Windows NT>CurrentVersion>ProfileList>”UserID related information”. There is a key called ProfileImagePath which you change to the OLD profile folder, save, reset, and all is well. There appeared to be no problems with by quick test, but of course i cant be sure of what could go wrong (namely just personal settings).
The stupid way or more problematic way, was what we did being to delete the newly created profile folder, and rename the old folder to match the new one (mlai renamed to mlai.DOMAIN is an example in this case). So after restarting, strange things started to happen. The wallpaper disappeared, the start menu was missing the docked icons and the recently used programs. What was more strange was that settings would not stick. So if you went to tools > options, and checked Show all hidden files and clicked apply, nothing would happen. Right clicking my computer in the start menu and saying show on desktop did nothing. This just wasn’t supposed to happen. So, what we ended up doing, was recreating the “new” profile, and moving all the files except the ntuser files and everything was fine.
Of course there were many other things that needed doing on this computer, but one that did surpise me since i have never seen it was the woman wanted to export her eudora emails and contacts to outlook. She had nearly 30000 emails… then again her emails date back to 2003, but still a lot.
Finished work earlier today at 4:30, was supposed to go and watch a movie at a mates place, but instead headed over to brothers place to pick up my lens for tomorrow (will post pics up tomorrow) and help a small bit with the photo proofs of previous weddings. Also wanted a small modification done to his simpleviewer gallery. Was simple enough to do, but he had the previous version which had a small bug, so do check it out (links).
Written by Milton Lai