Profiles for Vista Clients on a Win 2008 Server AD

[Laage]

Hey,

First of all I'm new to these forums so if this should be posted in "Windows Server 2008" just say so, and I'll move it.

Now to my question(s).

[ENVIRONMENT INFO]

I'm running a Windows 2008 AD with a number of XP Pro SP3 and Vista Business SP1 clients. The domain is a "rebuild" of a Win 2003 AD (with only XP Pro SP2 clients), ie. A new server was set up with Win 2008 Server and settings were recreated from the 2003 domain with some tweaks and fixes that would have been hard to implement with a straight upgrade. Then the users were imported into the domain and I ghosted the client-computers into the new domain.

The clients are using Roaming Profiles and Folder Redirection with Offline Files synch as all the clients are laptops, something which has worked very well on the Win 2003 Server/XP Pro SP2 combination AD, but it's not working as well with the new domain.

[/ENVIRONMENT INFO]

After some swearing and then some searching i found the the trick to creating a Vista Default User profile on the domain was to use the .V2 suffix when using the Copy To... command in "User Profiles", and when testing everything seemed to work as it should.

All the Vista users were new to the domain, ie. when they logged in for the first time their accounts were created from scratch. Everything seemed to work as it should, I could see on the server that their Home Folders and Profiles were created. However, for a number of the first time users not all of the Folders were redirected correctly. A number of them had errors in the registry under the User Shell Folders key so that for instance the Desktop was still pointing to the Home Folder of the account used to create the Default User profile. For some of the users a quick logoff and logon corrected this, but for others it was persistent so I had to manually edit the incorrect values.

The users are all affected by the same Folder Redirect Policy so there should be no difference that I can see, but as far as I can tell it's not 100% consistent what folders are affected by this though it seems that Desktop and Pictures are the most affected.

We get about 80 new users a year, and though I try to spread them out over a couple of days, I have to run a number of new logons simultaneously. I thought that it might be network or performance issues that forced some sort of timeout while creating a new profile that could be the cause of this behavior.

As I said earlier, we're using roaming profiles, and this worked well with the earlier domain. Now however, if an existing Vista user logs on to a new Vista client the user's profile is ignored by the client and the Default User profile is loaded and no correction is made in the User Shell Folders key of the registry, so that everything points to the Home folder of the user account used to create the Default User profile, and as the logged on user has no rights in those folders, an error message pops up for each of the redirect points, and that's quite a lot in Vista (Contacts, Desktop, Documents, Downloads, Favorites, Links, Music, Pictures, Saved Games, Searches and Videos).

To sum up; new user creation in Vista can be iffy but sort of works, but existing users logging on to a new/different computer gets the Default Profile instead of their own.

Edited October 16, 2008 by Laage