Dual sets of profiles in Documents and Settings?

I'm setting up a Windows 2000 box and I wanted to do mess with the profiles stored on the box a bit (changing the "all users" and "default user" profiles so that new users logging onto the box would get something cleaner than the default windows installation... something I've always done and has worked well).

On this box, instead of just the "Administrator", "All Users", and "Default User" profiles, there are two additional folders in the Documents and Settings directory that I don't recognize and don't know why they're there:

"All Users.WINNT"
"Default User.WINNT"

Does anyone know what those are, why they're there?

The reason that happened is When you run Windows 2000 setup, if another Windows 2000 installation exists on the partition you just installed Windows 2000 to, even if you used a different folder, setup creates the All Users.Winnt and Default User.Winnt profiles. This may happen if you tried to overwrite your existing Windows 2000 installation because of the difference is SIDs.

You can delete the unused ones. But I would make sure that I delete the correct ones. You can see what All Users and Default User profiles are being used by the Windows 2000 instance you just booted, inspect the data values of the AllUsersProfile and DefaultUserProfile Value Names at:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList.

Thanks! That's great information!

When I installed 2K on this box, it did already have another copy of 2K on it, but during setup I deleted that entire drive partition and reinstalled. I guess it still did it anyway.

I've also got something like that on my machine at home, which has had Win2K reinstalled several times. I have quite a few users that are seperated by a "."

mvigneau, is there a way to rename the folder? Or would if be too much trouble to go through the registry changing keys?

When this has happened to me, my solution was just to reinstall. There may be a dirty way involving lots of registry editing and rebooting, but I didn't want to deal with it.

mvigneau, is there a way to rename the folder? Or would if be too much trouble to go through the registry changing keys?

There certainly is. Depending on what user dir you want to rename and what user you are logged on with, you may not need this, but just for the sake of security, create a temp-admin user account that you will delete after this is all completed.

Quickest thing that comes to my mind is this:

0) Delete the unused user dir (c:\documents and settings\username)
1) rename c:\documents and settings\username.winnt into c:\documents and settings\username
2) Get a tool like Microplanet Registry Studio and replace every occurrence of username.winnt into c:\documents and settings\username
3) Logoff/reboot
4) Logon with username. Delete the temp-admin account and its userdir in c:\documents and settings\temp-admin .

You may also modofy the specific key that defines the variable %userprofile% for the user you are interested in, but I don't have if handy here...


Also, as I was saying in another thread, you may want to change the location of the documents and settings folder, which in my view should be in a different disk/partition than \windows od \winnt . To do that it's easy and quick:

Still using your temp admin account, xcopy (with all passible switches to copy permissions, audit, attributes and so on) to any other location. Then enter the registry and modify this:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList.

Double-click ProfilesDirectory. Enter the path to the new folder, and click OK.

logoff, reboot, done.