ProfileTool

Windows user profiles are important in the eyes of users: a fact often overlooked by IT staff. They make up what a regular user considers to be "the computer" - the remembered layout of shortcuts, documents, saved passwords and application settings. While saving documents on the network is common-place, saving the user profile is less so, mostly because IT departments consider them replaceable.

Keeping all this information in a profile is very bad form, but that doesn't change the fact that -- especially in small businesses - everyone does it.

While a good idea in theory, roaming profiles are prone to error and hard to apply to laptop users. They also add large waits to startup and shutdown to the untrained user who saves everything to their desktop.

The ProfileTool application allows you to take a user's profile and assign it to a different user, without having to copy any files or perform any manual procedures. It automates the somewhat arduous procedure of changing of permissions on the registry hive and files on the disk

This is a very common task for people who are taking a network of PCs that have not been on a domain, and joining them all to one; or if you replace a domain controller without keeping security information, which is sometimes done on sites upgrading from a badly installed SBS 2000 installation to a nicely installed SBS 2003 installation (the situation which it was originally written for).

It also has useful features for deleting a profile off the disk/from the registry, and changing profiles from roaming to local, replicating the features of the User Profiles capplet.

ProfileTool simplifies some common Windows desktop administration tasks that Windows doesn't let you do itself. For example, you can copy a profile in the User Profiles capplet, but you can't take one and assign it to a new user. You need to rename/move the profile in Documents and Settings, and also set the registry permissions inside NTUSER.DAT. This program does all that for you, and more.

Right click a profile in the list. You can perform various actions on it: - change the owner - delete it (from the registry, or from the disk, or both) - change from roaming/local (if it is a roaming profile)

Recompile in debug mode for some debugging options.