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swenger7

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Items on Start Menu Windows 2012 and Windows 8 (AD environment)

I am trying to find the location of the shortcuts that are pinned to the start menu. Whichever blogs or sites I look I see either

\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\  or
\AppData\Roaming\Windows\Start Menu\

However, when I look in my profile on my Windows server and on my Windows 8.1 (in an Active Directory Environment) in both I don't have the second location and in the first location I do not see my icons. I am not sure if it is different in a stand alone machine from a Network environment but would love to know where this location is.

Thanks,
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Cliff Galiher
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The entire start screen, apps and layout, is stored in a single file, proprietary, and cannot be simply manipulated.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj134269.aspx
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swenger7

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I am not trying to manipulate it. I trying to find the location so that I can figure out why if my %appdata% for the users are redirected to a network location so that the same files will be available when they log on to different servers running identical applications, yet the start menu doesn't appear. So for example if they customize their excel and then log onto a different server, their custom settings are there, yet when they pinned the program to the start menu and then log onto a different server, those pinned items are not there
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Cliff Galiher
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I had not realized that but you are correct. I looked on the local server and there is also a c:\users\username\appdata. That's too bad. Especially when many offices have multiple servers for redundancy, I can't understand why Microsoft felt it necessary to keep certain items local. Now the users will have to customize their sessions multiple times.

Thanks for the explanation
There are legitimate reasons. You rarely want your mouse configuration to roam, for example. Different machines have different mice and different devices. Keeping those settings local makes perfect sense. It is up to an application developer to support that.

Back to the start screen, not all machines will have the same applications or modern apps installed. So the layout needs to be machine specific to an extent. You can get some added flexibility by linking a local account to a Microsoft account. That way modern apps are also associated with that ID and you leverage that to provide uniformity across devices.