It should work but I’m not assuming that it does. I rebuilt the Windows 7 VM with an RTM release. The issue also exists on Windows Server 2008 R2. I’m trying to copy 1 user profile to another user profile. They believed people were trying to copy over the Default user profile. Microsoft acknowledged this but misunderstood the request. This was brought up earlier this May (2009) during pre-RTM testing. I googled and the first result was a thread on TechNet. I could select the Default profile but I wanted nothing to do with it. OK, profile files sometimes get locked even after a log out. I selected the profile in the user profiles dialog and went to click on the button. I set up my profile, logged out and logged in as admin. Up to then I was making great progress on my chapter which was already 2 days late. I went to test this on Windows 7 yesterday afternoon. You then configure the user objects in AD to use that profile. Once the profile is copied you rename the NTUSER.DAT to NTUSER.MAN. It’s not an NTFS permission but an internal one. That’s required to allow access to the registry hive contained in NTUSER.DAT. Part of the dialog re-permissions the profile for a group such as Authenticated Users. You select the profile of the sample user and click on to copy the profile to a UNC path on a file server. You go into “Control panel – System – User Profiles”. You log out and then log in as an administrator. You log into a sample PC as a user and configure the profile – shortcuts, desktop, registry, etc. It was pretty much the same in all versions of Windows I’d used going back to 1996. I’d previously written it based on MS guidelines for Vista and Windows Server 2008. Part of this chapter (my fourth in the book) is the creation of mandatory profiles.

It was decided to update the content for Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7. It was previously written using Windows Server 2008 and Windows 7 but some timing complexities stuffed the publication. I’m currently writing some content on advanced user management in Windows Server 2008 R2.

Ntuser dat windows 7