Date: Thu, 09 Jun 2005 11:15:56 +0100 From: Invisible Newsgroups: povray.off-topic Subject: One thing I hate about Windoze networking Roaming Profiles. Now, the idea of a roaming profile is simple. You put all your settings into files inside a special folder, and then those get copied to every computer you use. To me, this seems like a reasonable idea. However, M$ got it wrong - in a big way! You see, when a new file is added to your profile, the software (correctly) copies this to the server. However, when a file is *removed* from your profile, this removal is *not* copied to the server. IOW, next time you log on, the copy of the file on the server will be copied straight back, and it will be as if you never deleted it. That's easy - I'll just delete it from the server *and* the local machien, at the same time! :-) Actually, that won't help you. As soon as you use *any* PC that has the file in question on it, it will be copied back to the server when you log off. (And from there, to every computer you use.) In summary: to remove a file from your profile, you must remove it from the server copy *and* from _every_ PC you have ever used, /at the same time/. Now imagine you have several dozen users and several dozen PCs, and each person just uses whichever one is free at the time. Imagine they all have some file or other in their profiles, and you want to remove it. Just *think* about trying to access every machine on the LAN to remove the files, hoping that nobody decides to log off half way through (and thereby completely invalidate your entire effort). To summaries again: once a file is IN your roaming profile, it is for all practical purposes *impossible* to ever remove it. Great. Oh, but wait - it gets better! Every time you visit a web page, Internet Explorer caches a copy of it on your PC. OK, well fair enough - most browsers I've seen do this. It also records the URL you just visited for future reference. Again, most browsers I've come across do this too. Oh, but here's the fantastic part: is stores all this cached information... IN YOUR PROFILE! :-0 So, spent your lunch break browsing the net. You now have multi megabytes of data sat inside your profile that you don't even know is there. Wait 1 week for the poor sysadmin to notice, and by now these useless files exist on every machine on the entire network and thus (by the arguments above) cannot ever be removed. Fantastic! Of course, IE is carefully designed to delete the caches files once they reach a certain age. But you know what? THEY'RE IN YOUR PROFILE! They *can't* be deleted! IE will delete them from the local machine... but next time you log on, they will be copied straight back again. (Makes logging in and out really fast BTW.) But it gets better still! Everything - Outlook, Word, Excel - defaults to saving files IN YOUR PROFILE! >_< So there are users running about with 25 MB PowerPoint presentations inside their profiles. Oh, sure, you tell them that this is a Bad Thing, and they understand, but... the files are there now. You *can't* remove them! Did I mention that your desktop is also stored inside your profile? We have lots of people who put utterly huge files on their desktop rather than a shortcut. Then there's the people who archive their old email into a PST file in... yes... their profile! (Most of these reach tens of megabytes too.) Of course, with Windows XP, it gets even better. Guess what? It still stores cached web files in your profile - BUT IN A DIFFERENT FOLDER! So if you use NT and XP, you now have *two* folders filling up with pointless junk. Oh, and the history data is stored in two places as well. Even better: in XP, *temp files* are stored in your profile too! So next time you're editing that 75MB Word document and Word crashes out and leaves 125MB of temp files behind... they are immortalised in your profile. Excellent! But it gets better yet... Apparently, under XP, the Terminal Server client stores some kinda cache file in your profile too. (It's always exactly 20MB.) I can't *begin* to imagine what's in it... And then there's the small matter of that NTuser.dat file - which, apparently, can get larger, but can never ever become smaller. (Presumably a speed optimisation?) I don't know how, but some people have files that reach as much as 4 MB. :-| And of course, add to all of the above the fact that lots of these files are magically "protected" (system bit, hidden bit, desktop.ini...) Indeed, most of them can *only* be deleted by Windows Explorer (and only after clicking "yes to ALL" multiple times). Can't write a DOS script to automate the process in any way; it just refuses to do the delete. Just a few poorly designed points in the Windoze networking system. :-)