Windows XP weirdness - thoughts appreciated

LoLth

OK, I think I am now going insane...

The setup:
Windows server 2003 PDC on a domain with 200 users all are fujitsu-siemens PCs running windows XP SP2

All PCs are fully patched and up to date (after a week long patching frenzy I can now rest easy).

Domain\Users are members of the power users group on the local PC.

One of the users (Bob) is having a weird issue on his pc. His profile keeps forgetting to load its settings.

For example this week:
Monday + tuesday : working fine, no problems
Wednesday: Bob logs in and there are no user settings. no desktop shortcuts, no email settings, no documents. However, the user profile is still listed under "documents and settings" but is empty, as if it is a brand new user. Log out and log back in and everything is back again and the user profile folders have re-populated with documents, favourites, temp files etc.
Thursday: log in. blank again. log out and log back in again. still blank. so, I copied the user profile (the entire Bob folder) to another location - first bit of weirdness, it copied all of the documents and desktop icons and shortcuts even though they are not displayed in windows explorer - and then I deleted Bobs profile and any reference to Bob from the PCs local accounts and file system. Log off administrator and log in as Bob, a nice new blank profile is created (yaay!), I go to copy over the contents of the old profile and am happily suprised to find that all of the data is listed. (this was done when logged in as domain admin by the way). Log back in as Bob.. blank profile. the desktop shortcuts listed in c:\docs&settings\Bob\desktop do not show up on the users desktop on login. There are four icons in that folder and they dont appear on the desktop. As an experiment, I add them to the all users desktop listing and they appear.
set up the printers and exchange account and walk away confused but happy.
1 hour later: the PC was locked by Bob. when he unlocked it the desktop is there but all the setitngs I put in place for printers and email are gone. Documents are listed in the users my docuemnts folder in the user profile when viewed through explorer but not when you click on "my documents" in the start menu.

PC was bought in august 2006 , windows xp pro, never had any other user other than Bob. This happened just after he got it in august but the IT person here at the time set up his account again and everything worked fine up to now.

The user account in AD is identical to every other user account. All users are in the "user" OU with no sub groups created.

No one else has reported this issue.

any ideas?

matt-dublin

backup all files necessary
delete the profile altogether
do a search for his username in the registry
delete anything with c:\documents and settings\bobs username\ in it
and also delete the sid associated with the account on the local pc.

reboot

log in again.

if it doesn't work, right click the my docs folder and see where it is pointing to vs where its supposed to be pointing. if its not pointing where its supposed to be there is an issue with windows.

Apply xp sp 2 and all windows updates.

also check and see if his user account has roaming profiles enabled in active directory as this may also be the cause.

LoLth

matt-dublin wrote:

backup all files necessary
delete the profile altogether
do a search for his username in the registry
delete anything with c:\documents and settings\bobs username\ in it
and also delete the sid associated with the account on the local pc.

Yep, did this in a frenzy of annoyedness and desperation. Used Delprof from windows to delete *all* profiles except for the local administrator and re-created the account in AD (backed up emails to archive and re-attached them to the new email account on recreation... just to be sure).

The profile worked properly. This morning it was gone again.

matt-dublin wrote:

if it doesn't work, right click the my docs folder and see where it is pointing to vs where its supposed to be pointing. if its not pointing where its supposed to be there is an issue with windows.

all looks normal and happy.

matt-dublin wrote:

Apply xp sp 2 and all windows updates.

already applied and its absolutley 100% up top date with patches etc.

matt-dublin wrote:

also check and see if his user account has roaming profiles enabled in active directory as this may also be the cause.

nope, standard profile the same as everyone else.

Next step is a reinstall of windows.

matt-dublin

certainly looks like it.

nothing else springs to mind, sorry

Bebop

I run a network similar to yours with a mixture of Dell Optiplexes and Fujitsu Siemens PC's all on XP SP2 and Server 2003 DC's

I used to have hours of harmless fun tinkering with Windows XP, but now I just Ghost them, I have about 5 basic images for the different hardware configurations, re-imaging a PC just involves connecting to a USB drive, booting with a PXE CDROM and running Ghost, in 10 minutes the machine is back to its ideal build with all software installed, you just need to rename the PC and join the domain, it not pretty but it is efficient and cuts down on support hours

matt-dublin

bebop,

if you're using ghost make sure you're using sid walker as well. or else all the sids on all your machine's will be the same which can cause issues in active directory

Bebop

matt-dublin wrote:

bebop,

if you're using ghost make sure you're using sid walker as well. or else all the sids on all your machine's will be the same which can cause issues in active directory

LoLTh's original problem may have been caused by confusion of the SID in the active directory

A SID is generated when you join a machine to a domain
There are no SID issues if you ghost a clean machine that has not yet been joined to your domain, after deploying the image to a machine you rename it and then join the newly ghosted PC to the domain, this is the quickest way to fix an XP workstation that has gone bad,

Ghost can also be used in Multicast server mode to re-image a group of machines, this is where the Ghost walker is used to regenerate a unique host name and SID for each new machine,

LoLth

Thanks for the replies.

Machine is rebuilt (slipstreamed xp + sp2 + latest patches and software is installed via network... none of this fancy ghosting for me I tells ye!).

On the original issue: the machine was brand new and the comp name is the serial off the box which is unique.

hope its not an AD issue or there could be more popping up in the future

but at least I have an alternative to look into now with the SID / AD combo.

thanks