Change User Profile Folder Location in Vista

Here is how we can move user profile location.  Please note that we want all of the profiles moved, included Public and Default, so some of these steps can be skipped if you do not want that:

1. Make sure you have a complete backup of your system!


2. Copy the original Default Profile directory to the new location (e.g. from C:\Users\Default to D:\Users\Default).


3. Copy the original Public Profile directory to the new location (e.g. from C:\Users\Public to D:\Users\Public).


4. Navigate to 
   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList.


5. Change the value of the Default key to the new user profile location (e.g. D:\Users\Default).


6. Change the value of the Public key to the new user profile location (e.g. D:\Users\Public).


7. Change the value of the ProfilesDirectory to the new user profile location (e.g. D:\Users).


8. At this point, you need to restart and log back in as a different user that has never logged in before and therefore does not have a profile created.  In my case, the Administrator user had never logged in before so I enabled it so that Administrator could log in and used that.  You can enable Administrator login by loading Computer Management and then go to User Accounts, edit the properties for Administrator, and then uncheck Disable Login.


9. After logging in for the first time with the new user account, you will see “Creating Desktop” and other things like that while Windows is creating your profile.  Note that the new profile should be created in the new location.


10. After logging in, try to close as many applications as possible.  This will prevent most files from being locked so that you cannot copy them.


11. Copy the entire original user profiles folder from the original location to the new location (e.g. C:\Users\* to D:\Users\).  (See next step after copy starts).


12. There are a few things to note during this copy.  There were thousands of .TMP files that were locked and would not copy.  I just skipped these files.  I held down Alt-S so that I could see all of the skipped files and make sure that there were only .TMP files being skipped.  Yes, this took a little while, but at least I was confident that I got all of my files copied.  This process could probably be made easier using the command prompt or powershell.


13. If, in your case, there are some files that will not copy, you can run procexp.exe, which is file provided by sysinternals.  Then do a Find Handle and search for part of the filename.  procexp will tell you which programs are locking the file.  As long as you closed as many programs as you could, though, this should not happen.


14. Find and download a program that will do a Search & Replace on the registry.  I will not suggest one because I did not find one single program that worked perfectly.  I ended up downloading a few different freeware applications and using all of them.


15. Using the Registry Search & Replace program, do a search for the original user profile folder and replace it with the new user profile folder (e.g. search for “C:\Users” and replace with “D:\Users”.  Note that some of the applications I used would only change values and not key names.  However, the keys that needed to be chagned were all related to MuiCache.  I do not know if these actually need to be updated.  I did just to make sure.


16. Log out.  Log back in with the same user.  Repeat step 14 until there is nothing left to replace.  The reason for this step is that on logout, some programs seem to update the registry using the old user profile path.


17. Run regedit.exe and do a search for the original user profile path and make sure it does not exist.  The reason for this step is because (as noted in step 13), I did not trust any of the Registry Search & Replace programs I used.  I ended up needing to update about a dozen of the keys and values manually, since the search & replace missed them.


18. So that you can easily find programs that do not use the registry and hard-coded profile paths, rename your original profile folder (e.g. rename C:\Users to C:\~Users).


19. Log out. Log back in as your usual user.  Everything should be working correctly except for programs that use a “hardcoded” user profile location.


20. There are two easy methods that can be used to find programs that use a “hardcoded” profile location and are still looking for the original user profile path.  You can use the procexp.exe trick mentioned above and search for handles in the original profile location.  You can also monitor the oringal profile location to see if any new folders or files were created.  For example, in my case, FolderShare created some folders and files in the directory C:\Users\MyUsername\AppData\Local\FolderShare\.  So, I updated the FolderShare settings to point to the different path and then deleted the C:\Users directory (note that C:\~Users still existed as a backup).


21. Since you are now confident that all of your data has been moved (right??????), you can deleted the backup of the original user profile location (e.g. C:\~Users).