Sometimes I see people removing user profiles by just going into explorer. Going to the SystemDrive\Users folder, and using delete. Well this worked perfect on Windows 2003. But with upgrades to the profiling system with Windows 2008 and later this is a really bad idea.
There are 2 basic ways to remove user profiles in Windows today. And one for the special people.
Click method:
- Control Panel
- System
- Advanced System Settings
- Settings on User Profiles
- Select profile
- Press Delete
Programmatically:
Fire up powershell with administrative rights
Check out the SID for the account that you want to remove the profile for, then run:
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Get-WmiObject win32_userprofile| Where-Object {$_.SID -eq 'S-1-5-21-1347639444-34920355641-2049490221-1001'} | ForEach {$_.Delete()} |
Or just delete all unused profiles:
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Get-WmiObject win32_userprofile| Where-Object {$_.Special -eq $False -and $_.Loaded -eq $False} | ForEach {$_.Delete()} |
Wanna do it selfer:
- Start up Explorer
- Go to SystemDrive\Users
- Delete Folder
- Start RegEdit
- Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList
- Delete key for SID of user
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