NTUSER.Dat Shrink

Good Morning,

This is yet another NTUSER.dat inflation posting and a confirmation that the tool and process below does work properly.



We had NTUSER.dat files from 5 MB to 200MB !!
This was all being fed from SHARP and HP printer edits in the registry.  As the registry file normally behaves, just deleting the entries will not reduce the size of the file. Thus not resulting in faster login / logoff times.
So I started looking for shrink / reduction tools will no success, UNTIL!
Someone wrote this program below which creates a new registry file (ntuser.dat) and you can specify what to remove and copy.  It works really well and our users have been functioning just fine for the past two months.
At the sametime we purged the cached profiles on our citrix member servers.
BE AWARE - doing this may create new issues.  It will look like new issues.  If you are purging your cache profiles regularly you have a copy of the profile on the server and getting a full sync is not as critical.
Some things to look for in the Event Viewer are USER PROFILE SERVICE and event id 1509 which will let you know if you have files that are not syncing, your registry is locked, etc....



CompactRegistryFile.exe "path to profile ntuser.dat"  Software\SHARP Software\HP
                                                                                 ^^^Registry paths to remove^^^

http://www.experts-exchange.com/OS/Microsoft_Operating_Systems/Server/Windows_Server_2008/Q_27668833.html 

I am just starting to learn powershell and had our dev team writeup a quick program to run the utility through our entire profile share folder.  So it went through and shrunk every ntuser.dat file


Shadow path

When you run though the process above be sure to clear out your shadow paths in your registry. 

I has been running for a few months and none of the profiles have increased even after patching and software installs.

HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Terminal Server\Install\Software\SHARP

Follow up

Locked Registry - We are getting some failed sync


Adobe Flash cache location in the registry - We had profiles that did not sync because the full file path was too long due to cache location here. You will get the full path in the event log on the member server that failed the sync.
\\profileserver\userprofile\AppData\Roaming\Macromedia\Flash Player\