Renaming a User?

  • Thread starter Thread starter xper
  • Start date Start date
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xper

Under Windows 2K, I was unable to successfully rename a username and
get the profile settings to transition.

Under user mananager I renamed the user, then went to Documents and
Settings and renamed the profile folder of the old username to match
the new username. When I logged in though it created a whole new
profile folder named newusername.Newusername instead of using
Newusername.

Am I doing something wrong?

tia, XPer
 
xper said:
Under Windows 2K, I was unable to successfully rename a username and
get the profile settings to transition.

Under user mananager I renamed the user, then went to Documents and
Settings and renamed the profile folder of the old username to match
the new username. When I logged in though it created a whole new
profile folder named newusername.Newusername instead of using
Newusername.

Am I doing something wrong?

tia, XPer
Click to expand...

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;227933

Users are tracked by their SID (security identifier), not by some text
string you see for their username. Look in the registry under
HKEY_USERS to see the SIDs for each [local] user. However, the "home"
or profile root path for each SID is listed under
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows
NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList.

At one time, I used these keys to have the Administrator and my userid
(which is in the Administrators group) point to the same profile path.
Then whether I logged on as me or Administrator the desktop and other
settings were the same. However, I decided later to keep them separate
so if one got screwed up then I have a backup profile, and I just
periodically copy one profile over the other. Also, some programs will
use the full path to the profile rather than use the %userprofile%
environment variable, so they still wanted to use my old profile path
and I didn't feel like editing all the entries.
 
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