High volume of temp user profiles

If the profiles are an alphanumeric string and not a name, and consume little or no space, then you can probably safely delete them.

They get orphaned by inappropriate shutdown of the user desktop, and so I do not know of any ready way to prevent them from occurring.

Check for useless profiles at least monthly and delete.

Please don't delete anything...

Orphaned profiles will not be in the list if you run this Powershell

Get-ChildItem 'HKLM:\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList' | ForEach-Object { $_.GetValue('ProfileImagePath') }

Select allOpen in new window

Note that those profiles might have documents in them even if they are orphaned so backup then delete

You can always back up the profiles to a USB hard drive to be sure.

On machines that have some old profiles (alphanumeric names or names we know don't need the profiles) we just delete them.

can you please upload a screenhsot showing the some given files in File Explorer with all details such as owner, modification time and size.

Hi,


I backed up the user directory on RDS1 and RDS 2 and removed all user profiles with .xxx against them. This morning when people are logging in the server creates an error 'Remote Desktop Services has taken too long to load the user configuration from server \\XXX-AD-1.xxx.co.uk for user xxx'

Not 100% but I assume this is the reason for all numbered temporary profiles?

Is the solution on the AD servers on not RDS?

Those appear to be duplicate / temp profiles, one for each user.  Other than a user shutdown issue, I am not sure of any other problem.

Not sure what I am doing incorrect here, I have removed the temp profiles generated over time but hey have all reappeared, what causes this?

I did some looking around here for you. The solution below offers a method to keep the profiles from re-appearing.

https://www.c-sharpcorner.com/UploadFile/shyjumohan/fix-corrupt-user-profile-temp-profile-in-windows-server-20/

Please let us know if this assists you.

Thanks all and John, great find.

You are very welcome and I was glad to help you

How does that article relate to your issue?

It is about users linked to temp profiles, not orphaned profiles

Hi Shaun,

The article was to fix temp user profiles being created but this morning when people logged in they all reappeared so back to square one

I inherited the infrastructure that had been cloned to the cloud with no handover and am finding a multitude of other issues, the temp folder created only have the following in them, If I could find the source of this.

Hi Shaun,

The article was to fix temp user profiles being created but this morning when people logged in they all reappeared so back to square one

Exactly, it is not an answer to you issue

I inherited the infrastructure that had been cloned to the cloud with no handover

I guess you do not know how they set things up.
What server OS?  Can you run a Repair on it?