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Does someone know how to solve the problem of changing all country fields at once and probably why the country field is multiplied each time I select + apply a country change until the Object is being closed and reopened ?

Background Information, the domain been migrated from 2000 => 2003, and from 2003 => 2008 R2 Forest functional level. The problem is as following: Old users got the country field (cn) in CAPITALS, also each time the country gets changed the dropdown shows all countries one more time.

If the country gets changed manually directly (not via Admin Reccource kit mmc) the field is set correctly. I'll appreciate all kind of answers and comments even if they do not lead to an instant solve.

Find Examples and Pictures below:

Name - Country

John Doe - Germany (correct)

Fred Fail - GERMANY (wrong)

Open first time: Opening first time

Apply first time: Apply first time

Apply second time: Apply second time:

Becks TibiaFun
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1 Answers1

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Weird. One odd thing I noticed in your question was that you said "Old users got the country field (cn) in CAPITALS..." Did you mean to say countryCode or c or co? Because cn is not country code.

countryCode is an ISO 3166 integer.

c is the two-character string that corresponds to the aforementioned country code. (ISO 3166 column A2.)

co is the full, spelled-out name of the country.

When you set a user's country via ADUC, AD Users & Computers automatically fills out all three attributes for you.

When you set any of the three attributes manually yourself, you are also responsible for setting the other two attributes yourself.

So where does Active Directory keep this list of countries that are available? Actually, it doesn't. As far as Active Directory is concerned those are just more attributes that could contain anything, as long as the data type fits the constraint of the field. Put Mars in for co, Active Directory doesn't care.

The Windows OS is actually what provides this data to the ADUC console. Exports from kernel32.dll such as GetGeoInfoW, EnumSystemGeoID, GetLocaleInfoW, etc.

So all that to say that while I'm not 100% sure of your problem, it sounds to me like it is not actually Active Directory or any of the data stored in AD that is the problem, but rather a problem with the Windows library that is feeding you that list of countries, and it's bugging out the ADUC console.

So two things I would try, is #1 I would use a script to standardize all users in the domain and convert every co for every user into the appropriate Title Case, instead of all UPPERCASE. Secondly, I would try accessing ADUC from a fresh copy of Windows that hasn't seen 4 generations of OS upgrades.

enter image description here

Ryan Ries
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  • My bad, yes it is the co object, not the cn The Domain Controller hasn't been upgraded several times, just the forest functional level. A script could correct this all still I'd like to know why this is happening to avoid further issues since this happens OS independent (via admin tools on Win7 Enterprise, as well as via Remote on Server 2008 R2) – Becks TibiaFun Mar 18 '14 at 12:25
  • Hm, well I provided some interesting information, but I don't feel like I completely answered your question, so feel free to wait for a better one if you want. – Ryan Ries Mar 18 '14 at 13:17
  • The CAPITALIZATION is probably a remain from older days. It seems that the duplication of the country dropdown is a bug of ADUC on Server 2008 R2 / Windows 7... I've just tested it on an independent domain controller + domain (Test Lab) and receive the same error. If someone else could confirm that they have the same issue of duplicate country dropdowns values would be awesome. – Becks TibiaFun Mar 18 '14 at 13:47