Researching issues that several clients were having with slow Windows Roaming Profile logins and found that the common denominator was profiles being too large. Looked at Event Viewer and found nothing but Event ID 6005 – “The winlogon notification subscriber is taking long time to handle the notification event (Logon).” Looked at their Group Policy settings and found the folder that profiles were being saved in. Ran WinDirStat on the user.v6 folder and found some interesting details. It looks like downloads, Slack, Teams, and Zoom were taking up 13+GB of data that was then trying to be synced over the network. Looks like it is time to update the Group Policy to exclude some folders:If your company is looking to virtualize your servers or take them to the cloud, then contact us to setup migration evaluation.
GPO – Exclude directories in Roaming Profile
Open Group Policy Management
Edit the Roaming Profile policy
Open User Configuration > Policies > Administrative Templates > System > User Profiles
Enable – Exclude directories in roaming profiles
Add the following directories – Downloads;AppData\Roaming\Slack;AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Teams;AppData\Roaming\Zoom
Ok your way out
Open Windows Explorer and navigate to the user.v6 folder and delete the following folders:
Downloads
AppData\Roaming\Slack
AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Teams
AppData\Roaming\Zoom
Wait 15 minutes for changes to propagate then reboot the effected machines and login again.
If your company is using roaming profiles to keep employees agile in the office, then contact us to setup a group policy evaluation.
Had a client receive the message “There was a problem with your roaming profile…” after logging into another computer on the domain. Research and found that a simple registry fix was available, but most fixes wanted admins to export a key from another working profile then import it into the broken one. Here is the actual registry key that was used to fix the profile:
Registry Fix for roaming profile was not completely synchronized
Open Registry Editor as the broken user and NOT administrator
Navigate to HKCU > SOFTWARE > Microsoft > Windows NT > CurrentVersion > Winlogon
Right click and choose New > String Value and give it the name ExcludeProfileDirs
Enter the following – AppData\Local;AppData\LocalLow;$Recycle.Bin;OneDrive;Work Folders
Migrated a client to a new domain for reasons that are beyond the scope of this blog post. After the migration and proper setup of Folder Redirection to the file server, several clients were reporting that their files were not the latest version. Researched the issue and found that their was no trace of the latest versions of these files on the workstation or server via Windows Search, but did find shortcuts that pointed to a server that has not been in production for over a year. Powering on that server found none of the latest files and there was nothing at the old IP of that server that was housing them currently. Then it hits me on the way to church – Offline Files on the workstation. It turns out that during the era of the previous domain controller the Folder Redirection was not done properly and when there was a migration to a new File Server these few clients had kept a pointer to the old file server with Offline Files. All file changes and new files were stored in the local Offline Files cache up to the size limit of that cache. I had to do the following to gain access to the cache to copy all data to the newer file server:
Recovering Offline Files Cache Due to Bad Folder Redirection Link
Go through a long process of changing folder ownership one sub-folder at a time to drill down to the user’s data in a path similar to the one below. There will be several subdirectories to look through before finding the files needed. Please refer to this Microsoft TechNet Article for details on how.
%windir%\CSC\
Once access is gained into the folder, copied the contents to an alternate location.
Opened a Command Prompt and drilled down into that new folder.
Typed in the following command:
*.* /T /G username@domain.local:F
then confirming the change to apply Full Permissions to all files and folders that were copied there.
Copied the newly changed files into the appropriate place on the new file server and verified with user that their files were there as expected.
This won’t save everything but is the last option for this particular peculiar issue on the clients server.
If your company is using Folder Redirection or Offline files, then contact us for assistance.
