User Profile Complications - Any ideas?

[ahoysailor]

Hi all,

I may have the wrong forum - in which case I apologise and could someone please point me in the right direction!

I look after the IT in our office as network administrator - I am reasonably IT coherent, though had not worked much with server based networks before I came here - so its a rapid learning experience

I have a windows 2000 Small Business server with 6 win98 workstations attached and 1 win2000 workstation attached. I have several users setup, two of which have administrators rights.

Everything was hunky dory until a couple of weeks before Christmas, when one users profile started doing odd things. Whenever this particular user logs in on ANY of the windows 98 workstations he cannot open any microsoft office files (we run office2000). I get various registry errors saying things like "cannot find HKEY/CURRENTUSER/MICROSOFT ....etc key, check permissions etc". It is not always the same key it gets hung up on, and only seems to be MSOffice based as acrobat files will open fine. Also, when exploring directories this users profile seems unable to read the paths to the files stored on the server, as they show as "%thisdirname%" in the main explorer window in web view, though the path shows correctly in the address bar??? No other users have this problem.

The strange thing is this seems to be only a win98 related problem, the windows 2000 workstation works as normal with this users profile - all appears normal.

I have virus checked everything thinking that may have been the original cause, but found nothing. I ran regclean on all the 98 machines to no avail. I have removed the relavent profile (and all the profiles on the workstations) and put it back on, but I still have the same problem. Microsoft Outlook runs fine - though that may be as its a network component of exchange, whereas word, excel etc are stand alone installations on each workstation.

Does anyone have any ideas? I may have missed removing a profile element somewhere when I took the user off - but I don't think so.

I'm stumped.

Yours hopefully

Ahoysailor

 

[Shurik]

well , are those local profiles ? or is it a domain one ?
there is some difference between 2000 and 98 , read about it at Microsoft technet... Alex,
Problem? No Problem!
Drink more beer...

 

[ahoysailor]

Hmm, still plugging away with slight progress, its the domain profile thats got the problem - opening any office program except Outlook produces a consistant error "cannot access key 'software\microsoft\office\outlook editor'". I can now drag and drop office files into the relevent program to read them (with the program already open), but cannot open files by clicking on them in normal manner.

Been reading technet - very helpful, but not completely resolved problem yet.

Many thanks for the tip

 

[jamk555]

Do you use roaming profiles or local profiles?

Check poledit.exe and see if you see any permission errors/misconfiguration on the 98 boxes. I do not have a 98 machine in front of me, but I am pretty sure you can use it to change registry security settings. Make sure you know what you are changing.

Also, if this is consistent with all of the 98 boxes, I would check your server Group Policy Object and make sure it is not causing the issue. Also, remember, the most restrictive permissions will apply.

If you add a new user with the same configuration as your effected user, does that profile have any issues?

Hmm, this is interesting. I would think the 2000 box would be more restrictive than the 98 box. jamk555

 

[ahoysailor]

Thanks for the input,

We use roaming profiles.

I will have a look at poleedit this afternoon.
and I cannot see any issue with the group policy object - though I'm no expert

Adding a new user with the identical configuration works just fine - no issues whatsoever.This is what I have done to enable the person involved to acces their files - but its not a permanent solution as it complicates email addressing and accessing.

regards

Ahoysailor

 

[ahoysailor]

Erm....I stand corrected - we use local profiles now. We did originally use roaming, but stopped when we updated the system.

Ahoysailor.