Profile Comparison Tool

[sennister]

We are having some strange issues where some people have a profile (roaming user) that works perfectly with an application and others get an error. There appears to be a window of time where if the user profile was created in it works. If it was created before or after that date it fails. I could go into more details if relevant but in an effort to keep this short, does anyone know of a good tool that can be used to compare user profiles to find differences. These differences are likely to be buried deep in the profile in areas like Application Data and Local Settings if I were to guess.

While the machines impacted are XP machines, I figured I would post it here as it really is more of a higher level issue than XP.

I should mention that we know about profile corruption that can occur with roaming user profiles. This has already been eliminated as a possibility as the profiles have been rebuilt and I have been able to replicate the issue with local profiles as well as not everyone uses roaming user profiles. Using local profiles I have a workstation with a clean image that does not have an issue but other machines that have been customized for use on our network do have this issue when a new user logs in. This makes me think that there is something that is in the Default Profile that is causing this that hasn't made its way into everyone's roaming profile.

Anyhow if anyone knows a good way to compare two profiles I would appreciate it.

 

[sennister]

Hmm, I may have come up with a solution to my own issue.

I have used an application called Beyond Compare. It is a great tool to compare files and that is the capacity that I have always used it in. However it also does folder comparison. It may guide me in the direction of what is different. I will still watch this thread to see if anyone else has any ideas of what to use.