How to minimize or eliminate roaming profile problems in a network?

**plucky duck** · February 23rd, 2002, 02:20 AM

The network contains both Windows NT and Windows 95/98 client machines in a Windows NT 4.0 domain.

There are constantly profile problems that keep recurring, about 80ish calls to the help desk are with regards to profile problems. Things really get wonky, ie, application and windows errors, file errors.

Errors mainly occur when users are logged on to multiple systems. Logging between 95/98 and NT systems can cause errors, as well as the sequence that they log onto/log off a system.

My guess is that the errors occur mainly because they're loggin onto too many systems and different OS environments. Its the writing up and down of the network profile that seems to be causing the problem.

The users have roaming profile accesses. I was thinking what if they had mandatory roaming profiles instead, would that solve anything? I'm thinking since they can't modify their profile, it doesn't really matter then what OS they log onto, how many systems they log onto, and what sequence they should log on and off to.

One of the tech fellows tells me that somehow the roaming profile is linked to the registry. If I set the users' profile to mandatory then it will essentially lock down the registry and won't allow the programs (which require registry access) to run properly. Is he correct??

Their soon to be adding or slowing migrating to XP client machines, that may cause some more problems too.

Thx.
Plucky

**plucky duck** · February 24th, 2002, 10:30 PM

^

**DVNT1** · February 24th, 2002, 11:40 PM

I don't have any practical experience with roaming profiles. Just tried it out once as a test. I hate ot hear you have many problems with them. I am considering trying out with a pilot group (just some W2K servers/client).

Here's a link to help troubleshoot profile problems... http://support.microsoft.com/default...;EN-US;q154120

**skuz** · February 25th, 2002, 01:33 PM

Roaming profiles can be painful if used the way you use it : NT and 9x, since they don't save the same things, do it different way to a different place.

When you log off, it tries to write the new profiles to the specified directory, but it can change something on the other directory, which belongs to a machine currently logged on. It can be really painful if your users don't log off (like yours do) when they don't use a machine.

Yes mandatory profiles COULD theorically solve the problem. XP will solve it if you put it everywhere.