In response to a customer's request to get rid of her main username while
retaining all settings for that profile, I went here and tried out Ben
Moore's link to Microsoft's instructions for duplicating a user-profile.

The link was to this site:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;811151

But I'm durned if I could make their method work. Their instructions don't
make sense - they read thus:

<snip>
Create a New User Profile
1.Log on as the Administrator or as a user with administrator credentials.
2.Click Start, and then click Control Panel.
3.Click User Accounts.
4.Click the Advanced tab, and then click Advanced.
5.In the left pane, click the Users folder.
6.On the Action menu, click New User.
7.Enter the appropriate user information, and then click Create.
<end snip>

Personally, I can't see how one could get past step 3 - there's no
'Advanced' tab to be seen after clicking 'User Accounts' in XP, via the
route they describe.

So after a bit of experimentation, I devised the following method.  It seems
to work but if anyone can spot any glaring errors, perhaps they'd be kind
enough to comment:

1.Logon as a regular user with admin rights.(I'll call this user profile
ORIGINAL)
2.Go to Control Panel\User accounts and create two new user profiles with
admin rights.
3.I'll call these COPY and PLATFORM.
4.Log 0ff ORIGINAL and 'Switch User' to COPY so that this new profile is
assigned default settings.
5.Log 0ff COPY and 'Switch User' to PLATFORM so that this new profile is
assigned default settings.
6.Shut down.  Restart and logon as PLATFORM.
7.Change all folder settings to allow unrestricted file manipulation (no
hidden folders etc etc)
8.Go to C:\Docs and Settings and delete the contents of the COPY folder.
9.Copy the contents of the ORIGINAL folder to the COPY folder.
10.Shut down.  Restart and logon as COPY.
11.All settings for COPY should now be identical to ORIGINAL.

One reason I'm inviting comment is that Microsoft's instructions say not to
copy Ntuser.dat, Ntuser.dat.log and Ntuser.ini from ORIGINAL to COPY.  But
when I tried it by their rules it didn't work, so, on a hunch I copied those
files along with all the others.  And it seems to work fine.

I'll be interested to hear other views on the subject.

Ian Porter
Computer Guys Inc.
Arrowtown
New Zealand
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