My University uses Windows 7 professional roaming profiles with a domain. I'm not entirely sure how it works, so forgive me if this is a stupid question.
Is there a way I can reset my profile to its vanilla "out of the box" state for a new account? I've tried deleting pretty much every file I have write permissions on, but things in AppData like my Firefox profile, start-menu ordering etc all seem to get restored when I log back in.
Is this possible, or should I just ask the administrator? All the resources I've found have been for administrators to reset users profiles, not for users to reset their own.
Best Answer
With a roaming profile, your data is copied down from the server when you log in and (depending on organisational policy) copied back when you log out. It may also be configured to sync in the background.
Without access to the server you can't remove the server copy of your profile. But thinking about it, your user has permission to write to it so you could probably empty the folder...
You can find where your profile is stored on the server and open that path with windows explorer to delete the remote version. Doing it this way, you would need to empty the local and remote versions. You may even have to hard-power off the computer to stop it from trying to put anything back.
There's also stuff stored in the registry. Overall, to delete cleanly you need to follow this procedure by logging in as a different user (with administrative privileges): How do I delete a user profile on a Windows 7 machine that is part of a domain? You would have to have emptied the server copy first.
That said, it's probably just easier to ask your network administrator!