I'm reinstalling my Windows XP box. It has been on my home domain with a roaming profile for some time. I had earlier problems with the roaming user not able to log in at all but I can now log in.

The problem now is that settings in the profile are not "sticking". For example, the old profile has the "Coffee bean" background and the XP Themed appearance. Now, as it loads, it starts to set coffee bean, then before fully loaded replaces it with windows-blue, and the windows style is "classic". Moreover, I can't change the desktop or theme at all, and icons refuse to stay put if I move them. In the old setup, I had Outlook all set up nicely. Now, although it starts up it says it can't load, and exits.

Can anyone give me a hint as to what has gone wrong? Is there some registry or policy setting or machine-SID-related thing that would cause this?

Yours hopefully,
Ruth

System info: PDC is Samba 3.0 on Fedora Linux. I have 2 other XP machines that have been using the profile ok, along with the former install on the "problem" machine. Problem machine is a P4 3GHz, 1.5GB RAM. XP SP2 plus latest patches.

Roming profiles on a home network, respect.

You sure you have admin on both PCs. Probably a policy set from DC, but I don't know Linux, so I'm not much help.

Thanks :-) I have 3 XP machines, incl 2 laptops & a desktop, and one LInux Samba server. Works well except when it doesn't :rolleyes:

Yes, I have a local XP admin (of course) and a domain admin. On Samba 3, the domain admin is set with a password independently of Unix Root, but is derived from Unix root. And the local system has to be told that the domain admin is also a local admin. I have of course done all that.

I was really asking here in case somebody knew of a Windows-ish reason for a profile to behave in this way; all Samba is doing is providing file storage services, really. A real w2k3 server would have a domain policy setup, which is lacking in Samba, but that just means XP reverts to its own policies.

I've decided to try creating a new roaming account and see if that provides any more info.

Ruth