Last Updated on September 30, 2010 by Dave Farquhar
From: Malcolm James
Subject: NT switches between local and roaming profiles [comment on View 10]
To: dfarq@swbell.net
Dave:
I just saw your question “Anyone ever seen NT switch between local and roaming profiles?” in View 10.This used to happen to me too, about once every two months on average, but sometimes twice in the same week.. Using NT4.0J SP4 on a peer-to-peer NT workstation domain with no NT servers, NT occasionally created a new profile when I logged on. The old profile got renamed to username.bak, just as your analyst reported. Renaming the old profile and reconnecting shares puts everything back to normal.
We couldn’t find a documented solution, but one suspect was the size of the profile — 320MB, including an Outlook Express mailstore in its default location within the profile. Eventually I relocated the mailstore to a different partition and the not-recognizing-the-profile problem seems to have gone away. We still have no proof that the size of the profile was the cause..
Another suspect was that at one stage we’d had NT setup with the local profile pathname explicitly named in the profile section of the user manager. We later deleted it when we realized the pathname was only needed for remote profiles, but it may have left the registry confused at some point.
HTH
Malcolm
Thanks!
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.