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We have an upcoming demo of some software we've developed in a classroom setting. In order to demonstrate it, we are going to have the participants log in to one of our windows servers running 2008 via Remote Desktop. In order to make things somewhat more seamless, is there a way to pre-create the user's profiles on that machine?

Thanks!

Andrew
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    People generally logon manually, but you might look at mandatory profiles for this purpose. – Dan Nov 14 '14 at 19:28

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There are a few ways to do what you're looking for.

  • Use Group Policy (local or domain-based) to automatically populate user profiles with your settings. This is, arguably, the cleanest way to do what you want and easiest to reverse.

  • Configure the default user profile to contain all your required settings. When users logon for the first time they'll receive your settings in their newly-minted profiles. This is more difficult to reverse than using Group Policy.

  • Logon as each user and set your required settings. This is, obviously, a very manual process.

  • Create a mandatory user profile and apply it to each user. You'll need to be careful that the permissions inside the ntuser.man file allow the user to access the hive. By default a ntuser.dat file created for one limited user won't be usable by another. It's unclear to me if this still functions properly in Windows Vista or newer versions of Windows using local user profiles. Personally, I wouldn't chance it, and I'd use a Roaming User Profile.

You'll really like how it works if you can get Group Policy to configure the user environment. That's what it's designed for and you'll have the least "friction" trying to do it this way.

Evan Anderson
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  • I may have misunderstood, but I thought he was trying to increase the speed of the first login (where the profile is created). OP, perhaps you could clarify? – Dan Nov 15 '14 at 17:21
  • It'll be interesting to see. I took it as "Let's make sure the user environment has our software pre-configured." – Evan Anderson Nov 15 '14 at 17:54
  • If you know the account passwords you can log onto each one very quickly using runas /user:dom\username - which will ask for a password. Alternatively you can script this using psexec -u dom\user -p pass \\server "cmd /c exit". By executing a job as the user it should create a basic profile. It *won't* run all the first time login stuff which appears in systray. – Ian Murphy Nov 17 '14 at 10:54