Here’s a weird one that I just ran into recently on a network we inherited from another IT consulting firm.

A little background on this issue. The environment has a Windows active directory with Windows 7 clients. Several GPOs configured including folder redirection. A new user was just set up and a day later started getting a temporary profile.

Our tech team tried some things that have worked before to fix temporary profiles. We tried creating a new profile but no local profile directory got created. Tried deleting the backup profile registry key but that wasn’t there, system restore didn’t fix it either. We tried putting the user in their own OU with a folder redirection GPO. But no matter what we tried, they would continue to get a temporary profile. Copying the user resulted in the same problem. The problem followed the new user even when logging into another computer.

If an existing user logged into the computer they logged in just fine. That led us to look at Active Directory. What ended up getting this problem resolved was to inherit inheritable permissions on the user that had this problem. There must have been something in the new user’s AD permissions that wasn’t right and we were thinking the GPO requires some inheritable permissions for it correctly set up the profile on the computer. After that was done the new user received a normal user profile.

Weird!