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Windows 2008 Remote Desktop User Profile Stored on RDS Server

I have a Windows 2008 R2 Standard Remote Desktop Services server that's part of a Windows SBS 2008 Domain. I'm trying to setup user profiles so that when a user logs into the RDS server, their profile is stored in a central location on the network (\\computername\sharename\useraccount). This is working fine, but it appears that any documents or settings changed by the user are also being stored on the RDS server. I would like the RDS server to strictly be an application server that does not store any data, including user profiles. I've been playing around with the settings in Active Directory to ensure profiles are pointed to the share location, but nothing I do seems to prevent user files from also being stored on the RDS application server. What am I missing?

ActiveDirectoryman

You can use roaming profiles and have them point to a central location like what you are doing now and set a policy for your RDS servers that deletes cached roaming profiles when the user logs off.

ActiveDirectoryman

Even if you have a centralized store for roaming profile a profile still has to be created on each computer that the user logs onto. Your profile contains registry settings which are contained in a ntuser.dat file.

brownmetals

ASKER

My fear is that these local profiles that are created on the server are going to become bloated and take up more disk space than I'd like. If I understand your 1st post correctly, the GPO you're speaking of will remove the profile from the RDS server as each user logs off. Is that correct? If so, where might I find this policy. I haven't been able to stumble upon it as of yet.

Thanks!

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ActiveDirectoryman

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brownmetals

ASKER

Thanks for that great info. This does in fact delete the user's LOCAL profile on the RDS Server, but it throws this warning in the Even Viewer.

Event ID 1517

Windows saved user DOMAIN\User registry while an application or service was still using the registry during log off. The memory used by the user's registry has not been freed. The registry will be unloaded when it is no longer in use.

This is often caused by services running a a user account, try configuring the services to run either the LocalService or NetworkService account.

I found this article that provides further explanation:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/support/ee/transform.aspx?ProdName=Windows+Operating+System&ProdVer=5.2&EvtID=1517&EvtSrc=Userenv&LCID=1033

I also found this article which suggested using the User Profile cleaner to help alleviate the issue:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/837115
However, this utility can not be run on a 64-bit machine (I'm using a 64-bit RDS Server).

The first article suggests nothing needs to be done. The 2nd article offers a solution that would work for a 32-bit machine. My concern is that there could be memory leaks if these profiles aren't unloaded properly. Any further thoughts?

Thanks!

ActiveDirectoryman

check this out:

they have a beta release

http://blogs.technet.com/b/uphclean/archive/2008/10/31/new-uphclean-beta-build.aspx

From my experience with Terminal Servers I have seen memory leak issues with user profiles. I come from an network that is the largest private enterprise network in the world with over 700,000 pc workstations and thousands of servers including terminal servers I have never seen memory leaks associated with roaming profiles.