"Allison" said in
Thanks to all for your responses to my previous posts ...
however ... I've tried them all and I am still having problems.
I know you all think I'm a blundering idiot .. and when it comes to
my newness to computers, I guess I am.
I'll try to describe a little further what is going on, and maybe
someone can help;
With the l-o-n-g computer name, it is really stretching folders and
files excessively lengthened.
For example ... a pathway would appear as below:
"C:\Documents and Settings\ THE JOHN SMITH FAMILY \Application
Data\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files\Content" .... As you
can see, it is really stretched to the seams.
If I haven't already set everything up, I would go for the terrible (
GASP !!! ) reformat the drive and start all over again Any help
and assistance will be greatly appreciated.
Thanks folks
Allison
"C:\Documents and Settings\ THE JOHN SMITH FAMILY \..."
You really managed to get leading and trailing spaces included in your
account name? In my following lengthy discussion, I'll have to assume you
did and I'll use your old account name with those spaces in it. If,
however, you mistyped and those leading and trailing spaces really don't
exist in your account name then eliminate them wherever your old account
name is mentioned below.
The "THE JOHN ..." in the path is NOT your computer hostname. If you want
to know what is your hostname, run "ipconfig /all" in a DOS shell or
right-click on My Computer, select Properties, and look under the Computer
Name tab panel for "Full computer name". What you are asking about is your
account name (aka username). When an account is created (and after logging
onto it), the following path is created:
"C:\Documents and Settings\<accountname>"
That's your *profile* path. You can run "echo %userprofile%" as a command
prompt in a DOS shell to see your profile path. What you want to do is to
change your account name.
- Open "User Accounts" in Control Panel.
- Click on your account (i.e., " THE JOHN SMITH FAMILY ").
- Click the link "Change my name".
- Enter your desired account name and click "Change Name".
However, I do not see mention that this will also force a rename of your
profile path to use your new account name. A registry setting dictates
where is your profile for your account, but the profile path can somewhere
completely different and not even include your account name. That is, you
might have changed your account name but it might still use the same old
profile path that was created under your old account name. At a command
prompt in a DOS shell, run the command again:
echo %userprofile%
This will tell you what account name, old or new one, is currently used for
your profile path. In fact, according to Microsoft's KB article # 283111
(
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=283111), this seems to verify my
suspicion that changing the account name does not also change your profile
path. However, if the above DOS command shows your profile path is now
using your new account name then don't bother with the rest of this message.
I'm assuming you are configured to participate in a workgroup and am not
configured to authenticate and login to a domain. If you run the "Local
Users and Groups" applet(lusrmgr.msc), under the Users node you should see
you newly renamed account name listed. Look at its properties under the
Profile tab panel. There is a Profile Path field there. However, from what
I've read, this panel is for configuring roaming profiles so I don't know if
you can change your profile path here.
Maybe someone else can verify that this is where you could change your
profile path. If so then you don't have to do any of the registry editing
mentioned below. However, I also suspect that it simply specifies a new
profile path that gets created when you next logon under that account but
none of your old profile gets copied or moved to that new profile path.
So what I suspect would work is to logon as Administrator and rename the
directory:
"C:\Documents and Settings\ THE JOHN SMITH FAMILY \..."
to:
"C:\Documents and Settings\<newaccountname>"
(without the angle bracket, of course, since I'm just showing a placeholder
for where you put your new account name). Since you are only renaming then
everything under that path still exists there. Then run regedit.exe to go
into the registry and change in there where your account specifies where is
it profile path.
Once in the registry editor, navigate to the HKEY_USERS hive node in the
tree. See all the "S-1-5-..." keys under there? Each one is the security
identifier (SID) that gets assigned to each account. But how to tell which
one if for your account? Navigate to the following registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList
This lists the SID for each account (the Administrator account won't be
shown because its profile path is fixed, probably even if you rename the
account name). Highlight each "S-1-5-..." subkey. Notice there is a
"ProfileImagePath" data value under each. That tells Windows where is the
profile path for that SID used to identify the account. One of them should
have a ProfileImagePath that points to the profile path for you account.
Edit ProfileImagePath so it points at the directory you renamed your profile
path. So the new value would be:
ProfileImagePath = C:\Documents and Settings\<newaccountname>
Now the registry's setting telling where it says is your profile path
matches your change your profile directory to which you renamed it. That
is, you should now have:
- A directory named "C:\Documents and Settings\<newaccountname>".
- ProfileImagePath points to "C:\Documents and Settings\<newaccountname>".
Logoff from the Administrator account and logon under your <newaccountname>.
If the above worked, you will see your old desktop.
The above is from memory. In the past, I actually defined a couple accounts
in Windows 2000 and edited this registry key to point at the same profile
path. This made 2 accounts by different names share the same profile. When
I have needed to change the profile path for an account, it's the
ProfileList registry key that I look for. While you can change your account
name, I don't think it does anything to modify your profile path or its
name. You can also change your profile path without changing your account
name. Account name and profile path are two separate attributes of your
account. Hopefully the above gets them sync'ed together.
Unfortunately there is a side effect of changing your profile path. After
you logged on under your account by its old name, applications you ran
thereafter or actions you performed thereafter might record what was then
your current profile path. For example, an application may record where it
stores data under your profile path as:
"C:\Documents and Settings\<oldaccountname>"
rather than as:
"%userprofile%"
In the former case, the path that got recorded was static copy of your then
current profile path. In the later case, the data value in the registry for
that application would point to whatever is your current profile path
regardless of how many times it had been renamed. So you are going to have
to do some hunting in the registry. With the topmost node in the hive tree
highlighted in the registry editor, do a search on:
"Documents and Settings\ THE JOHN"
That search string should be sufficient. You are then going to have to edit
that data value to change that portion of its value from:
"C:\Documents and Settings\ THE JOHN SMITH FAMILY "
so it then points to your new profile path of:
"C:\Documents and Settings\<newaccountname>"
I just did a scan through my registry. If I change my profile path then
there would be over 100 data values that I would have to edit to also change
them to use my new profile path. All because the values were static (i.e.,
they hardcoded the C:\Documents and Settings\<accountname>" into the data
value). Sucks royal.
There is a way to copy a profile from one account to another [new] account.
Right-click on My Computer, Properties, Advanced tab panel, User Profiles,
Settings button. You use this after creating a wholly new user account for
yourself (and after first logging into it so its profile path actually gets
created, then log back on under your old account). You select your old
account in this User Profiles dialog, click Copy To, and browse to the
directory for the profile of your new account. You also have to be sure to
change permissions on this 2nd copy of your profile (that you are placing
atop the profile location of your new account) so that your new account has
permissions to that profile. You then logon under your new account, it uses
its profile which is a copy of your old one, and you delete your old account
(which does not delete the old profile path so you'll have to do that).
However, as mentioned above, this changes none of the registry data values
that would be pointing to your old profile path, so you still end up in the
registry doing tons of edits.
Changing your account name is easy. Changing your profile path is harder.
Editing the registry to then change all data values using your old profile
path to point at your new profile path is a real pain. As with any major
changes like this, be sure to backup your data. Saving a disk image would
help a lot if you need to restore back to the same state the system was in
before you began all this.
