I have a laptop user who has lost their desktop items and My Documents
contents etc as well as access to Outlook data files.
When I look in the Registry at
HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Shell Folders, I
find that most of the string values in this key point to C:\Documents and
Settings\TEMP path instead of C:\Documents and Settings\<user name> which is
the default that this user was set up with when they were set up on the
laptop.
The laptops are set up so that the main user has a local profile. Everyone
else who logs on gets a roaming profile from the server.
Folder redirection is applied by GPO. The GPO setting for the group they are
a member of explicitly redirects their folder My Documents and Desktop to
%USERPROFILE%\Desktop and My Documents meaning that these should be set to
wherever the user's profile comes from. Ordinary this is not this TEMP
folder. I do not know why this would have been changed to C:\Documents and
Settings\Temp for this user. It is a very strange situation.
What other steps can I take to try to determine why the user's profile path
has changed? I haven't yet looked in User Shell Folders but I expect it will
probably contain the expected Expandable String values loaded with variants
of %USERPROFILE% as normal.
There is definitely no user called TEMP and no idea why this path would have
been created to be used for a userprofile.
I remember another user was having problems one day because an application
had altered one of the environment strings causing their path to be wrong.
This meant Windows could not load a DLL it needed because of the path
change. Is it possible that an application has somehow changed the
environment variable %USERPROFILE% ? How would I be able to determine what
is causing this to happen?
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