Monday, August 29, 2016

Removing domain user profiles from a Windows machine

Local accounts can easily be removed in the appropriate section of the Control Panel. How to remove domain profiles, though, is not nearly so obvious. This is how to completely remove an arbitrary user profile:
  1. Open the System control panel section (not the Metro one)
  2. Open the "advanced system settings"
  3. On the Advanced tab, click the Settings button in the User Profiles group
  4. Select the target profile and click Delete
The dialog will take a while to load. I think Windows goes through the contents of each profile to calculate its size, which is an expensive operation. It's a little bizarre, in my opinion, that there are two versions of this dialog, only one of which is useful in any way. Typing "user profiles" into the Start menu's search box will produce one that's missing almost all the profiles.


Searching for "user profiles" brings you the left version, while going through the System control page produces the right one.

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