Here is a hack that worked in 2005 with Windows 2000 on a Windows 2000 network with SMB protocol. It's still working in 2008 on Windows XP, but my university upgraded all the machines and I don't notice a signifigant speed up anymore (I'm not special anymore.) It works by reducing the enourmous bloated collection of useless configuration files stored in a profile directory.

My immediate reaction was naturally to delete all the files. Muhaha! If only it was that easy. Windows didn't get the hint, and every bit of data was copied right back again when I logged off. I did the natural thing to make sure this wouldn't happen and replaced each directory and file in the profile with a blank file of the same name. This worked perfectly, but turned out to be a Bad Idea due to an unforseen consequence: Windows now refused to let me log on again. I don't recommend trying this. Fortunately, there are Linux machines in the ever trusty and somewhat obscure Centre du Calcul in Physics. The Linux version of Windows' (eg) net use j: \\donjuan.sus.mcgill.ca\iDrive * /user:INFOPOINT\user was smbclient.

Here's the hack,

• Edit the file ntuser.ini, adding in the name of every directory under profile into the [ExclusionList] (something like that) section. As far as I can tell, this should stop Windows from trying to look for these when logging in so taking them out is now safe. Delete them.
• When you log out, Windows pretends to be you when copying over those files. This is easily stopped by removing file creation permission from your own account on profile.
• When you log out, you should get a (very satisfying) message stating that "Windows cannot update your profile. Detail: access is denied." That's right Windows, you have been rejected. I'm still trying to get a screenshot of that somehow.

Well, the settings aren't all useless. The ntuser.dat file also contains some information that I would like to keep, like settings to stop stupid web folder content, initialize paths, set up the command interpreter, and various other registry tweaks. Stuff that Windows should have as the defaults, but inexplicably does not. Unfortunately, Microsoft made the format of the registry data files purposefully obscure and editing them is essentially impossible as far as I know. Moral: do all your settings first before implementing this hack. I missed a the View Settings on explorer.exe and now I'm stuck, every time I log on to Windows, having "Hide extensions for known file types" and "Remember each folders view settings" on and creating a hidden file all the time. It's really annoying.

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Articles I've written (from a long time ago.)

From http://neil.chaosnet.org/documents/articles/profile/.