The right way to transfer a profile?

Experts,

SBS2003 domain. Exchange installed, but this user is was saving mail to pst on a w2k laptop. She also synced her Outlook 2003 with company web.

User leaves, new person comes in and takes that person's place. I created a new user, logged on as new user to build path, logged off and back on as admin, copied the old profile to the new profile using the copy utility available via My Computer-->properties, giving access to the new user.  My docs were redirected to server, so I just copied them over to new user after the fact and changed permissions.  Simple enough right?

But I noticed at first that the new user profile was not near as large as the old user.


When I checked, I noticed that the Outlook Data did not transfer. (Frankly, I couldn't remember if it was supposed to or not.)  So I coped the contents of the Outlook folder over and changed permissions for the new user.

When I logged on to new user and opened Outlook, it said it would not start because it was looking for Data in the Old location, but did not have permission to access data. I was told I would need to redirect data via Outlook Tools -->e-mail accounts. Fine. But I couldn't access Outlook

So I logged back on as admin, added the new user to permissions on old users data. Then I lofgged back on as new user, could open Outllok (by still accessing old pst) and then point it all over to the new user location.

I don't remember having this sort of problem before. I got it all worked out (sometimes, isn;t that all it's really about anyway??) but I want to know what I could have done differently.

Thanks