The curse of the roaming profile.
The Microsoft Windows roaming profile must be dead by now. I’m not sure that it was ever a good idea. Essentially, a user’s preferences and files were saved on a network server and synced back to the server from a workstation when the user logged out and synced back from the server to a workstation over the network when the user logged in. The theory was that multiple different users could log into the same machine and have their own, individual “desktop experience”. It also, in theory, meant that a user could switch machines and have their desktop, files and preferences follow them to the new machine.
All the machines would have to be set up the same way with the same applications, but this is pretty much the norm anyway in corporate environments where each machine has an identical image.
Microsoft 365 seems to have made the idea moot, as files are now in cloud storage and the browser-style interface has become standard. Well over a decade ago, companies started issuing users individual laptops that are connected to a docking station at the office and used to connect remotely from home. Users always have their own machines. I never worked anywhere in a situation where I had to share my cubicle and the computer there with a co-worker.
One situation in which multiple users did switch machines regularly was also the scene of a roaming profile disaster that I witnessed. At the college where I was teaching a new network guy was hired who thought that roaming profiles would be a great idea in the school’s computer labs. Students could – in theory again – move from lab to lab and log in on a different machine each time and still have their files and their desktop preferences. In actuality, what happened was that each morning, at the start of the 8 o’clock classes, 2500 users all logged on at once and the network crashed. Students – newbie users -- were saving all their files to the desktop instead of to the network drives that were available to them. The new network guy was fired...
I had my own run-in with roaming profiles at the office of a new consulting business client. The client was experiencing network problems. The network was so slow as to be almost unusable. It was taking over 20 minutes for users to log in in the morning. My predecessor had tried to set up a wireless network using those 10Mbps wireless adapter cards with a little antenna on the back of each machine. He had set up roaming profiles, which were all in vogue at the time (even though there were just 4 employees who all had dedicated machines). And to make matters worse, this was in a basement office with concrete walls between all the machines and the server...
I decided to tackle the issue by hard-wiring the entire network with new 100Mbps NICs. This solved the speed issues for all but one user. The desktop files scenario reared its ugly head again. The problem user was a manager who liked to download music and video files to her desktop which somehow made it easier to then copy them to a portable drive to take home. When I suggested that perhaps this was not what business computers were meant for, she told me that because she was a manager she should be able to do whatever she wanted, and I had to make it work. And besides, she was dating the owner’s son.
I tried in vain to get her to use a shortcut on her desktop to a folder I had made for her on the server instead of simply saving her downloads to the desktop. This was “too complicated”. I eventually got rid of the troublesome and unnecessary roaming profiles completely and the download-crazy manager was none the wiser. She could happily save all her files to the desktop and she could also log onto the network in seconds.