Hello all,

I work for a company that recently started rolling out Windows XP Pro. The PCs we are implementing are Dell white-box systems. The original PCs that were rolled out were built from scratch (ie: XP configured and all apps loaded). I am fairly new to the company and have a good amount of experience with Ghost. I suggested we use Ghost to create base images to cut alot of configuration time. Another coworker took an existing XP system and ghosted it to 5 other machines. SYSPREP was not used (much to my dismay). The PCs are all XP Pro SP2 connecting to 1 of 2 Novell servers depending on which corporation they belong too. The Novell Client installed is Version 4.83 SP1. All users login to Novell as their individual Novell user (jdoe for example) and context (accounting.server for example). We created a XP local account simply named "Accounting" since we have no Microsoft servers.

We seem to be having a problem on the PCs that were ghosted and no problems on the PC that was used to ghost from. The problem is that after a few weeks (roughly) we will get a call from one of the 5 users that they lost their desktop icons, my documents, so on and so on. The local "Accounting" user profile is corrupt. This has happened multiple times on all 5 systems. If you go into C:\Documents and Settings you will find an "Accounting" user folder and an "Accounting.001" user folder as well. They are currently operating out of the "Accounting.001" folder. While this can be repaired fairly easily, it seems to come back. We are pretty much at the point of rebuilding them all from scratch. My initial thought was that the problem was possibly caused from SYSPREP not being used in the ghosting process. I ran SYSPREP on all 5 problematic systems and have had 2 of them have the corrupt user profile problem since then.

I have wondered if there could be a problem with the Novell Client version. I talked to a former co-worker and he mentioned that he had problems with Novell Client 4.83 SP1 on XP and moved up to 4.90 SP1. I had thought there could be an issue with the local username matching the context (ie: Accounting XP user and Novell context accounting.server).

Any ideas before we start blowing these away and rebuilding them?

Thanks,
Lance in AZ