We've got two Windows 2003 terminal servers running Citrix Metaframe PS 3.0. We are not using roaming profiles. We have another terminal server farm where we did enable roaming profiles and we've had nothing but problems with them, mainly with corrupted profiles. To try and give the user the same functionality of roaming profiles we've enabled terminal server home directories and folder redirection via a GPO assigned to the container the servers are in (loopback processing is enabled).

So far this setup has been working quite well for us. The user gets the same desktop no matter what server they login to. Their "My Documents", Favorites, etc, follow them from server to server. The problem I'm having is that the terminal server creates a local profile for each user that logs in. That's OK, I understand Windows needs to do that. What I don't like is that since we're not using roaming profiles, some settings, primarily those in Internet Explorer, are resident only in that local profile and do not move with the user from server to server.

What I'm trying to do is to redirect the default location of the %USERPROFILE% directory from a local drive |C:\Documents and Settings| now to a network drive. I found the registry entry HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Windows NT\Current Version\ProfileList\ProfilesDirectory and tried to point it to a UNC path. When the user first logs in it initially looks like it's going to work but hangs. After 30 seconds or so I get a popup message that the server couldn't create the temporary profile directory and that I was being logged in with a default profile. The rest of the popup box says that the problem could be caused by a permissions error. To eliminate a permissions error I granted "Everyone" full access at both the share level and the NTFS security level.

Does anyone know what the problem might be or if there's a better way to do what I'm trying to without using roaming profiles? Thanks.

>> Changing location of the default %USERPROFILE% directory