MED-V: The Importance of Setting the UpdateServerProfileDirectory value in the SYSPREP.INF file

Article
01/06/2011

By default, the automatic copying of customizations from the Administrator profile to the default user profile will not occur with SYSPREP if using Windows XP SP2 (with Hotfix 887816) or Windows XP SP3. This is discussed in the following article:

https://support.microsoft.com/kb/959753

To avoid the problems that may arise from this issue with MED-V, be sure when preparing a workspace image for deployment, that the SYSPREP.INF file has the following entry in it:

[UNATTENDED]

UpdateServerProfileDirectory=1

Here’s one particular example of an issue that may arise if the value is not set:

I recently dealt with an issue where we had an application suite (Web Application for Internet Explorer 6) that was preinstalled as a series of add-ins under the administrator account when preparing the image. After deploying the image, we noticed some strange behaviors:

1.) Seamless Mode logins for new users were not getting the loaded add-ins or other critical application components.

2.) The Administrator account was still able to use the application in the workspace.

3.) The new users could log off of seamless mode and then, after having their policies changed to full desktop, could log back on and get the application to launch after automatic re-configuring.

4.) The Sizes of the NTUSER.DAT files differed significantly between correct behavior and failed behavior.

In this case this particular cause was two-fold:

1.) When a MED-V Workspace Starts, the Shell that is triggered in the guest OS is actually a program called WORKSPACESTARTER.EXE that will either load the shell used for seamless mode (KidaroShell.exe) or the regular explorer shell if running in Full Desktop mode. This particular application could re-load it’s add-ins upon logon if Explorer.exe was loaded as the initial shell.

2.) The automatic copying of customizations from the Administrator profile to the default user profile did not occur with SYSPREP.

The SYSPREP.INF file delivered with MED-V version 2.0 will have this value already set.

Steve Thomas | Senior Support Escalation Engineer

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MED-V: The Importance of Setting the UpdateServerProfileDirectory value in the SYSPREP.INF file

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