Switching from roaming profiles to folder redirection in a painless way

Question

We have a windows 2008 domain. We used to have roaming profiles which were pointing to "\nas\homes\\Profile.V2". Now we want to switch to local profile + redirected folders (Desktop and My Documents).

That's what we've done:

• go in A.D. and emptied "Profile path" and "Home folder" attribute.
• go phisically to the user computer, then go Computer > User profiles > changed from "Roaming" to "Local"
• applied desktop & My documents redirection policy.

Now, the desktop & My documents folders have been redirected correctly. The problem is the profile. For instance, the AppData folder is still the one used with the roaming profiles, so if I delete it, the user profile on the client computer become unusable.

How can I tell to the clients that they need to keep the profile on the local computer?

I hope I've explained the problem in a clearly way.

Thanks in advance.

Matteo

EDIT

I didn't mention that there was a policy which redirected the AppData onto a shared folders, but now it's disabled (checked through gpresult on the client). Unfortunately the AppData folder still points there.

Answer 1

Redirection of the AppData folder is done via group policy, not by specifying a roaming profile. You don't mention removing or reverting this group policy setting, so I'm guessing that's the problem.

Use gpresult to check whether there is still a policy in place. You'll find it under Folder Redirection, the same place as the policy redirecting the desktop and documents folders.

Note that folder redirection policy has an option to keep the redirection in place even when the group policy no longer applies. So you might have to explicitly set new policy with the "Redirect to the local userprofile location" option.