How to remove remotely Outlook profile? Cannot find path 'HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Outlook\Profiles' because it does not exist.

Question

Hello,

I am trying to remove remotely Outlook profile. I am local admin in my company.

When I use Invoke-Command:

Invoke-Command -ComputerName $currentPC -ScriptBlock {remove-item -Path "HKCU:\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Outlook\Profiles"}

I'm getting the following error:

Cannot find path 'HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Outlook\Profiles' because it does not exist.

• CategoryInfo : ObjectNotFound: (HKEY_CURRENT_US...utlook\Profiles:String) [Get-ChildItem], ItemNotFoundException
• FullyQualifiedErrorId : PathNotFound,Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.GetChildItemCommand

I run the script with admin rights, so I have a feeling that scriptblock cannot identify HKEY_USERS for current user who is logged on remote machine
and somehow points to my registry entries. How can I make this script work?
Should I use user's SID on HKEY_USERS? Tanks

Answer 1

Should I use user's SID on HKEY_USERS?

Yes.

Answer 2

Hi，

HKCU is a symbolic link to a key representing the active user under HKEY_USERS key and the information in this key is built during the logon process. You can specify a user account with the -credential parameter.

Best Regards,
Ian Xue

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Answer 3

Hello

Thank you for your question and reaching out. I can understand you are having issues related to Outlook profile.

From Outlook 2013 (which supports side-by-side installations), the profiles are stored in HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\%version%\Outlook\Profiles, where %version% is 15.0 for Outlook 2013, 16.0 for Outlook 2016, etc. In your Script try to change to this path with user context may be with logon script.

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