Enter ProfileNurse - Your Skilled Profile Care ProfessionalUser profiles can be bitchy. A single misbehaving profile is bad enough, but what if you have hundreds or thousands of them? Most admins have a boatload of profiles strewn across file servers, and no way of knowing anything about them because they are lacking the management tools. That’s where ProfileNurse comes in, a free tool for offline profile management. It can not only manipulate arbitrary settings stored in profiles but also gather different kinds of information about each profile on a file server.

Commenter Steven asked in response to my article on how not to delete local user profiles for the correct way to script the deletion of user profiles. Here is how. For completeness sake I start with the manual method.

This article is part of Helge’s Profile Toolkit, a set of posts explaining the knowledge and tools required to tame Windows user profiles. Roaming user profiles tend to grow over time, which is sometimes referred to as profile bloat. In and by itself, profile growth is not a problem. Users of desktop PCs who log on the the same machine every day will not even notice that they have huge profiles ready to follow them around the network. Their locally cached copy of the roaming profile is always current. No need to fetch anything from a file server during logon.

Updates: Update 1: Fixed bugs in the batch file and made it available for download Update 2: Wildcards are now supported Update 3: Timestamps are now copied from source to destination files. For this, touch.exe is needed. Update 4: File names with spaces in them are now handled correctly I recently bought a new compact digital photo camera, Panasonic’s Lumix LX3. Although I acquired it solely for its still image capabilities, I quickly discovered that it records video in very high quality, especially when compared to my digital video camera, a JVC model equipped with a hard disk on which video files are stored in MPEG-2 format in DVD resolution.

User profile problems are among the most common support issues. It is only appropriate that Microsoft simplified the troubleshooting process over time - but forgot to port it over to Vista.

In many environments it is a common practice to delete user profiles prior to conducting tests in order to start with a clean slate. However, this may prove more difficult than anticipated.

In the ongoing virtualization war much has been written (pro and con) about the value of memory overcommitment, a feature VMware ESX has and Microsoft Hyper-V is lacking (XenServer, too, for that matter). But only few people take a look at what the term overcommitment actually means. In this article I will explain how overcommitment works, why it greatly benefits VDI installations and why Microsoft denies exactly this.

It is a common practice amongst administrators to disable the creation of short filenames on NTFS. I freely admit to have recommended this in the past. Was I wrong? Background

Choosing a domain name that will only be visible from an internal network may look simple. Unfortunately, it is not. The basic problem: How to avoid collisions between the internal namespace and the internet?

My New Book is Out: Windows Server 2008 Command Line ReferenceThe command line is a powerful tool. Many a tedious task can be offloaded to a cleverly written script. Scripts and batch files, however, are like tool boxes without too many tools (which relates more to batch files than scripts). To become truly powerful, the boxes must be filled. That is what my reference book is all about.

From time to time the question gets asked how a batch file or console program can be executed silently or hidden, i.e. without a console window popping up. If you do not know what I am talking about: press Win+R, type “help” and press ENTER. A black console window will open, execute the HELP command and close again. Often, this is not desired. Instead, the command should execute without any visible window.

A few weeks ago I published the tool ParseCitrixLicense which displays the contents of Citrix license files in a human-readable form. The original version 1.0 did not support XenDesktop licenses, for the simple reason that I had none to test my program with. Recently my colleague Nicholas Dille provided me with a XenDesktop eval license which I used to implement the missing tags in ParseCitrixLicense. Please see for yourself what ParseCitrixLicense extracts from a XenDesktop license file.

With the release of the hotfixes KB946633 and PSE450R02W2K3037 ClearType font smoothing is finally available on both the current and the upcoming Citrix flagship products Presentation Server 4.5 and XenApp 5.0. Remains the question of how to configure it.

It took five years and probably lots of customer complaints, but finally one of the most important technologies introduced with XP/Server 2003 is available over the remoting protocols RDP and ICA: font smoothing aka ClearType.

I will make a bold statement here: corrupt user profiles are a myth. That may seem very bold indeed, with 331,000 hits on Google for “corrupt user profile” and countless admins complaining about having to deal with corrupt profiles on a daily basis.

Update: Version 1.1 supports XenDesktop Licenses in Addition to XenApp Licenses Most Citrix products rely heavily on license files. While the basic format of a license file is somewhat documented, most fields used in license files are not. This makes understanding their contents difficult. It does not help that the license files can hardly be called readable with most of the relevant data in one long line.

While working on the next edition of my book I found several documentation errors on Microsoft’s Technet pages describing the command line tools of Windows Server 2008. One of the graver errors relates to clustering.

A recent discussion with a colleague brought this topic to my attention which I have not discussed in detail in my series on Windows x64: Memory scalability of 32-bit Terminal Servers

Much has been written about the many new features of Windows Server 2008 Terminal Services. Now, with the upcoming release of Citrix XenApp 5.0 (Project Delaware), Citrix updates its best-selling product and ports it to the new platform. Brian Madden analyzes whether it is still worth buying Citrix XenApp / Presentation Server on top of pure Windows Terminal Services.

Recently I got into a very interesting discussion with my colleague Nicholas Dille on various aspects of Windows x64. One question he brought up was especially intriguing: knowing about registry redirection, it is not astonishing to find that the 32-bit version of the registry key HKLM\Software\Classes (aka HKCR) gets to be HKLM\Software\Classes\Wow6432Node. But there is also HKLM\Software\Wow6432Node\Classes!? How can there be two different Wow6432Node 32-bit keys for one 64-bit key?

This is the seventh part of a mini-series on Windows x64, focusing on behind the scene changes in the operating system. In the last article I explained that mixed 32-/64-bit processes are not allowed and how that rule affects both administrators and script-writers. In this context I mentioned the strangely named directory SysWOW64. Today I am going to explain what it is used for by starting with redirection.

This is the sixth part of a mini-series on Windows x64, focusing on behind the scene changes in the operating system. In the last article I discussed how 32-bit applications are wrapped up in the WoW64 subsystem. Today we will take a deeper look at some limitations of 64-bit Windows and what they mean in practice.

This is the fifth part of a mini-series on Windows x64, focusing on behind the scene changes in the operating system. In the last article I explained that the 64-bit OS can only load 64-bit drivers. Today we will turn our attention to user-mode code and analyze how the move to x64 affects downlevel applications.

This is the fourth part of a mini-series on Windows x64, focusing on behind the scene changes in the operating system. In the last article I wrote about the changes to the x86 processor architecture that make x64 possible. But there is of course more to a new platform than just updated hardware.