I did not know about skiprearm I will have to take a closer look, Thanks. Also thank you for that link. It does a good job of consolidating everything that is needed for mandatory profiles to work. It also illustrates my need to make the Domain Guest account work correctly. This is 6o minuet 37 step process needed for every profile. Additionally the process can no longer be delegated to a junior technician due to its technical and security requirements. If we can get I can get the Domain Guest to work the way it has in the past and the way it is published to the same process will be a 3 step 5 min process. I really don’t mean to be difficult, but I have 50+ unique mandatory profiles across my user base with one or two change requests a week. Windows XP can handle this without a second thought. I don’t believe that it is realistic to believe that http://support.microsoft.com/kb/973289 will scale to that environment. Actually the education space is having a really difficult time with this. Check some of the other forums. There are thousands of complaints from the higher education space regarding this; and it has become a stopping point for hundreds of Windows 7 projects across the education market. Everyone I communicate with that is rolling out Windows 7 in large campuses is using unsupported hacks to make the profile copy process work like it did in Windows XP. If I can get Domain Guests to behave as I think it is suppose to I think I can bypass that entire problem. Thanks, Jim

Is there a trick to getting Windows 7 to use the Guests group function correctly? I know how to set it up in Windows XP, I have several hundred XP desktops with Domain Guest accounts working perfectly. But I can’t get the Guests function to work correctly under Windows 7. I create a Domain Account with a roaming profile. Setup the defaults for that profile; make it a member of the Domain Guests group, and make Domain Guests group a member of the Local Guests group on each PC. In windows XP this results in a public account that can be used on any pc but whose settings never get saved to the server. That way the account is kept clean for all guest users. However in Windows 7 even though the profile has a status of temporary in the User Profiles settings page every logoff gets saved; which is exactly what is not supposed to happen with Guest accounts. Any suggestions would be appreciated, Jim

Thanks for the suggestion Juke, I’m not sure your understanding is completely correct in a domain profile environment. The current XP accounts are Domain Guests and Domain Users, but I have several hundred Windows XP SP3 PCs running in this manner. At every shutdown they do not copy the profile to the server and they do delete their local profile copy. At every boot up they copy a template account located on a file server to the local pc and use that as their local profile cache. Windows 7 does not do this. Windows 7 also does not honor the Group Policy that instructs the account not to save desktop changes to the server copy. It does not even revert to the default local PC profile. Windows 7 completely ignores domain users who are Domain Guests and treats them as a Doman User. In addition the Windows 7 Domain joining process no longer adds the Domain Guests group to the local guests group. This is published behavior that Windows 7 is not following. What use would a Guest account be for an enterprise if there was no way to standardize that profile for users? The user's desktop and settings would vary widely for every different computer that the user logged on to. Currently with XP when I need to make a change to a profile I log on as an account that shares the profile but is not a Domain Guest, make my changes and logoff again. The changes are copied to the server and automatically used by every PC in the enterprise. I have many different Guest profile sets that I manage this way. Requests by managers to make changes to department guests can be easily and quickly fulfilled by jr IT staff or even power users. I am very familiar with the mandatory profiles option that you suggest. And I had used them frequently in the past before using the Domain Gusts group. Aside from being more difficult and time consuming to manage, the real problem here is that Microsoft has depreciated the ability to copy profiles on Windows 7. In the past I could create a fully usable profile and copy it to a network location and change it to mandatory. But that can no longer be done. The only profile that can be copied anywhere is the local default PC profile. And there is no way to customize that profile or overwrite it. The only supported Windows 7 method requires scripting a sysprep process which takes a ridiculous amount of time just to make even a single change. Sysprep is also now restricted to run only 3 times before you have to completely reimage the pc to a state before the third sysprep. All these changes make use of mandatory profiles under Windows 7 very difficult if possible at all. I would be very interested in your suggestions for a function method to manage Guest use profiles in an efficient way. Thank you, Jim

Hi, Thanks for your feedback. I would like to advise that you can use skiprearm option if the sysprep command will be run several times on a computer. You can access the following link regarding customizing default profile. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/973289 Juke Chou TechNet Subscriber Support in forum. If you have any feedback on our support, please contact tnmff@microsoft.com. Please remember to click “Mark as Answer” on the post that helps you, and to click “Unmark as Answer” if a marked post does not actually answer your question. This can be beneficial to other community members reading the thread. ”

Hi, Only one Mandatory profile is enough If you want all the guest users to use the same manadatory profile. Juke Chou TechNet Subscriber Support in forum. If you have any feedback on our support, please contact tnmff@microsoft.com.Please remember to click Mark as Answer on the post that helps you, and to click Unmark as Answer if a marked post does not actually answer your question. This can be beneficial to other community members reading the thread.

Hi, Thanks for the post. Based on my expirience, the Guests always use a temporary profile which will be deleted upon logging off. In this case, I assume that the Guests account you create are also located in the Users group, so this happened. Please check this again. If you want this kind of user to use a same profile enviroment, you may consider useing Mandatory User Profile. please refer to the following article. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc786301(WS.10).aspx Juke Chou TechNet Subscriber Support in forum. If you have any feedback on our support, please contact tnmff@microsoft.com. Please remember to click “Mark as Answer” on the post that helps you, and to click “Unmark as Answer” if a marked post does not actually answer your question. This can be beneficial to other community members reading the thread. ”

Hi, How's going? Please feel free to give us any update. Juke Chou TechNet Subscriber Support in forum. If you have any feedback on our support, please contact tnmff@microsoft.com.Please remember to click Mark as Answer on the post that helps you, and to click Unmark as Answer if a marked post does not actually answer your question. This can be beneficial to other community members reading the thread.