I’m wondering how to safely remove a domain user profile from a computer that is a part of a domain. I don’t want to delete the account from the domain itself, I just need to remove the profile from this computer, to do some cleanup.
I’m currently on a Vista Business computer, but we also have Win XP Pro and Win 7 Pro.
Open up “Control Panel | System and Security | System”
In the dialog click on “Advanced system settings” (requires Admin rights)
The “System Properties” dialog will be displayed
Make sure you are in the “Advanced” register
In the “User Profiles” section click on “Settings”
The “User Profiles” dialog is displayed
Select the account. Hit Delete.
Start | Run
sysdm.cpl
switch to register “Advanced”
In the “User Profiles” section click on “Settings”
The “User Profiles” dialog is displayed
Select the account. Hit Delete.
The greyed out button possibly means that the registry hive has not been released by the operating system, as pointed out by @joeqwerty in the comments.
Delete the C:\Users\[ACCOUNT] directory. That leaves some registry entries behind that have to be manually deleted as follows.
Open Regedit with Administrator Permissions (Runas Administrator)
Select the HKEY_USERS branch
Search for the Domain Account without the domain (e.g. login = DOMAIN\ACCOUNT then search for ACCOUNT)
Keep on searching until the status bar shows Computer\HKEY_USERS\[SID]\Software\Microsoft\Windwos\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Shell Folders
There should be a large list of your ACCOUNTs folders e.g. C:\Users\ACCOUNT\Desktop
You are in the right HKEY_USERS\[SID]\Software\Microsoft\Windwos\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Shell Folders
branch if the ACCOUNT in “Shell Folders” matches the ACCOUNT you just manually deleted form the C:\Users\[ACCOUNT] directory. This branch [SID] can be exported and/or deleted to clean up the last of the user profile.