Spontaneous creation of new user profiles

[ckaye]

Here's a new one for me. Just today, a handful of users called me saying that their outlook started up and asked them to re enter all their profile info. I looked in the "documents and settings" directory on the citrix server, and for each of these problem users, a new profile appeared, with a ".great" extension. For example, current user joe now had a second profile called joe.great.

Great is our domain here, but I'm not sure why this is happening spontaneously, and only to a few users. Any help would be appreciated.

 

[enigma99]

Hey ckaye,
that usually happens when their roaming profile does not get unloaded successfully from the citrix server. I've seen it where it will start generating more profiles like joe.great01..joe.great02 and so on.

You might want to make it a point to delete any cached roaming profiles on your servers (PM stuff). Also, use the UHPClean utility from Microsoft. It works on 2k and 2k3 servers. This service closes down any handles that are left open when a user tries to log out from the server.
If you use 2k in a AD environment, you might want to get a GPO going and force it to delete any cached roaming profiles.

Hope that helps.

 

[Ogi]

Hi,

Also sounds like their profile has been corrupt.

There are three files that need to be renamed/deleted to resolve this. They are:-

ntuser.dat
ntuser.dat.log
ntuser.pol

Your system may differ but the first two will be there.

Note: All user settings will be lost when you rename/delete these file but their desktop shortcuts should still be there.

Cheers,
Carl.

 

[ckaye]

Well, for the users mentioned, they only use roaming profiles, they never have a direct network connection to the exchange server or any other server for that matter...

 

[enigma99]

Like ogi was saying, it sounds like the roaming profile is corrupt. We understand that the end-user is probably connecting to a published application instead of a direct connection to a server. But, sometimes the roaming profile does not unload properly or gets corrupt which causes those cached profiles.
That is why I mentioned the microsoft utility and also doing some PM on your citrix servers.