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'All Users' profile superceeding users

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by helfrich

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Recetly, several of our NT workstations seem to be ignoring any of the user's profile personal and security settings. The 'all user's' profile seems to be the only one working. However, the problem is fixed when the user's profile is redone. There are multilple user profiles on each machine, so it seems like the common link is the 'all users' profile. Any suggestions would be great! Thanks.

5 replies

by curlergirl

The All Users profile is always in use, in addition to the user's individual profile. IOW, the user's actual desktop and settings combine BOTH the settings in the All Users profile AND the user's individual profile. If I log on as Administrator, for example, and load a program that puts a shortcut on the desktop in the All Users profile, then every user who logs on to the workstation from then on will also see that new program icon. It appears that the users' individual profiles are getting corrupted on these workstations. If they are roaming profile, then you need to wipe out both the local and the roaming profile and recreate a completely new roaming profile. If they are local ones, I'd recommend deleting all of the local profiles so that each user gets a completely new profile when he or she logs on. I know that's not the greatest solution, esp. if the users have greatly customized their desktop settings, etc., but this is really the only way to fix it if they are indeed corrupted. Hope this helps!

by helfrich

Thanks a lot for responding. I guess that's another part to the question. This happened to approx. 30 workstations at once. The local administrator profile works fine. Do I definatly have a corruption issue, or is there some setting that is ignoringall user settings?

by curlergirl

The only other thing I can think of that could cause this to happen would be if someone at the network admin level decided to set up a group policy and mandatory profile for all users at the network level, which would control the users' settings andreplace any changes they might have made with the mandatory profile each time they logged on.

If that's not the case, then it's definitely pretty odd that it would happen on 30 workstations at once. Did you change anything on your network - i.e., move roaming profiles from one place to another, add or remove a server, change drive mappings or locations of various resources, etc.? Or did you have some kind of widespread network outage (i.e., a server, hub or switch going down for a period of time)? This definitely sounds like corruption of the user profiles. This can happen over time to individual profiles for various reasons, but to have it happen all at once to a large number of profiles sounds suspicious.

Hope this helps!

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