After my organization upgraded all its desktop machines to run Windows 2000, we soon discovered that replacing old PCs with new ones in a Win2K environment is very different from doing so in a Windows 95 environment. The profiles were killing us because they required the user to log on to the PC before we could restore their data.
We developed an automated solution to this problem. The solution is a mix of resource kit utilities and custom code that runs on Win2K Professional machines (we haven't tested the code on Win2K Server). Even if our solution doesn't exactly meet your needs, it might provide helpful information about the Win2K profile-generation process.
Our process moves most configurable settings—including desktop and startup customizations, drive and printer mappings, and Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) settings—for each user profile on the old PC directly to the new PC. This direct PC-to-PC copy process (rather than a PC-to—network share—to-PC copy) has the advantage of reducing network traffic and conserving disk space on a file server. . . .
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