Customizing Default Profile and Files Stored On This Computer

  • Thread starter Thread starter badobsession81
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B

badobsession81

Hi all,

I'm new to the group but have read many articles/posts on customizing
the Windows XP default profile and the issues/complications involved.

I have had a lot of trouble with how user's 'my documents' and related
folders display in the "Files Stored on this Computer" section of 'My
Computer' and in general.

Background:
-------------------
I customized a profile following Microsoft's support page...
I created a user called 'Rich'
Logged in as 'Rich'
Customized as required.
Logged in as Administrator and copied 'Rich' to 'Default User' (via
Control panel's System options)
Created a new account called 'Steve'
Logged off and logged in as Steve.

This generated Steve's profile with the same settings as my new
default based on Rich's profile.
But, 'Files Store on this computer' only displayed Shared and Rich's
and not Steve's (I assume it is supposed to show this)
Also, while My Documents displayed as 'My Documents' when logged in as
Steve, the sub folders (pictures/music) showed as Rich's Music or
Rich's Pictures which would obviously be confusing to a novice user.

---------------------


Thanks to this group and other forums I learnt to edit the desktop.ini
files to delete the 'Owner' entry when creating my customized default
profile. This produced better results, but was still not exactly as it
would have been had I not edited the default profile: Now there is no
'owner' tag at all, and so I would need to manually edit them all if I
wanted all users to receive the same experience of seeing other user's
documents as "User's Documents" rather than just "My Documents" etc

Also, editing registry entries enabled me to show all user's 'My
Document" folders in "Files Stored on this Computer" - is this how it
is meant to display.

My Question:
==========
I assume that normally, with no editing of the default user profile,
all of this happens automatically. Is it at all possible to achieve
this automatically once you have edited the default profile? I have
succesfully implemented the workarounds, but is this the only way? Is
it a known bug that editing the default profile results in these
things not happening automatically?

Thank you so much to anyone who took the time to read this comment - I
appreciate it's a minor issue, but one that is frustrating when you
want to create customized default profiles but keep all the standard
views etc :-)

Much appreciated,

Bob
 
Just thought I'd add that I've noticed that moving the My Documents
folder and then moving it back again (via right click > properties >
move) on each user results in better correction to the above problems
as opposed to simply editing the registry. Editing the registry sorts
the 'Files Stored on this computer' issue, but still lists a user's
'My Documents' as 'My Documents' even when viewed from someon elses
account. Actually moving the My Documents Folder results in the 'Files
Stored...' issue being resolved and displays that user's documents as
"User's documents" and not just "My Documents" when viewd from a diff
account.

Is it possible that there is another registry key that needs updating?
I assumed that the desktop.ini file contained in the My Documents
folder would rectify this (by setting "owner=User" but this does not
seem to be the case - that attribute only appears to work for the
pictures and music folders. In that case, what is the point of the tag
in the my documents folder? Or is this just another bug?

ANyway, hope this is useful to some people and not just boring the
hell out of you! lol
Hope that someone might have the answers out there???

Cheers, Bob
 
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