Properly re-building domain user profile in Windows 10?

[djoye]

I've been tampering with Windows 10, trying to determine what I can customize and what apps I can strip from it without getting in trouble, often this requires me to rebuild the user profile. The machine is on a Windows domain, so my typical process would involve deleting the profile from c:\users\<profilename> and then from the ProfileList in the registry, unfortunately, this doesn't seem to fully restore the trashed profile.

Windows 10 remembers something about that trashed profile, such as which apps were removed, and then that carries over when you try to login after deleting links to the old profile. I now the changes I made were user-centric since I can login with a profile I've not yet used and all the apps are in that profile.

tl;dr: Windows 10 is remembering things about old domain user profiles even after going through the standard process of rebuilding the profile. I need to figure out how to completely wipe the user profile and the app associations so it rebuilds more completely.

 

[bigdogchris]

You should be deleting the profile from System->Advanced System Settings->Advanced tab ->User Profile Settings rather than the way you listed.

*Edit* Clarified how to access the screen.

 

[djoye]

Since the computer is joined to a domain and accounts are domain accounts, these accounts don't show as being on the computer so it can't be deleted through the standard tools available in Windows. What seemed to work was using a tool called delprof2, I've used it before to remotely delete user profiles that were eating up hard drive space and didn't think to use it for this particular task but when I did it seems to have done the trick.

My process was basically as follows:
1. Login to the computer with the account I wanted to clean up. This rebuilds any registry keys I had deleted.
2. Restart the computer to release any locks on the profile.
3. Login to the local administrator account, launch a command prompt as admin and run x:\>delprof2 /id:username and answer the prompts to delete the desired user profile
4. Logged back into the account that I just deleted and found apps restored that were previously gone.

Delprof2 can be found at Delprof2 - User Profile Deletion Tool • Helge Klein

 

[bigdogchris]

Since the computer is joined to a domain and accounts are domain accounts, these accounts don't show as being on the computer so it can't be deleted through the standard tools available in Windows.

That's true, but that's not what I suggested to do so I have no idea why you are even mentioning it.

The screen I suggested to delete them from is the built in Microsoft utility for deleting local copy of domain accounts.