Deleting cached roaming profiles

Question

How to ensure roaming profiles are removed from workstations after a user logs off.

Symptoms

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Cause

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Resolution

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Instructions

In Windows 9x/Me.

User (roaming) profiles ensure users' registries follow users between machines. Also known as "roaming profiles", this is a recommended method for configuring networks to ensure that any application and configuration changes made by users only effect them. Roaming profiles ensure that the HKEYCurrentUser registry hive is copied between the user's home area on the server and local machine when users log on and off.

Ranger 4 by default enables roaming profiles to ensure user's registries are copied between the server and client machines correctly at logon.

If a user does not have a user.dat (i.e. is a new user), one is created by taking a copy of the "default user's" registry the first time the user logs into a machine.

In both Windows 95, 98 and Me, the user.dat and profiles are copied locally (typically to c:windowsprofiles) each time a user logs onto a machine.

By default, Windows does not delete these locally cached profiles (to speed up logon for a typical business one-user-per-machine environment). However, in environments where there are many users logging on to many different machines these files may eventually lead to local hard disks becoming full.

To delete these profiles, add the following line into the login script:

deltree /y c:windowsprofiles

This will ensure that each time a user logs on, the previous user's profiles information is deleted. Note: Since Deltree is an external program, ensure it is on each machine in the Windows directory or specified path.

As a consequence of deleting the profiles directories, the following dialog will be displayed whenever a user logs on:

This is a standard Windows dialog and cannot be suppressed normally within Windows.

Ranger, however can be configured to detect this dialog and automatically "press" the "Yes" or "No" button when it appears.

Use RangerAdmin's Edit Settings General dialog to configure the automatic response to this question.

It is recommended that "yes" is pressed, as this will ensure the correct operation of policies and roaming profiles.

In Windows NT / 2000 professional

To delete cached roaming profiles on Windows NT or 2000 machines, a registry key can be set.

This can be configured either through Microsoft Policy Editor, Windows 2000 Active directory domain policy or from within RangerAdmin.

The setting is in the WINNT.ADM template file under the "Windows NT User Profiles" section entitled "Delete cached copies of roaming profiles". Ranger 4.1 also includes this setting in the default supplied RangerNT.adm file (see below).

Using the WINNT.ADM file.

Using the Ranger 4.1 pre-configured setting.

When the "Delete cached copies of roaming profiles" option is ticked, roaming profile files will be removed from machines each time users logs off. 

Testing

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