Fact or Fiction? The Truth Behind the Corrupt Profile

Since the inception of the user profile, system administrators and end users alike have been plagued with profile corruption. But has it all been a terrible misunderstanding? Are profiles getting a bad rap for causing mass sorrow and hassle among millions of companies? Let’s take a look.

A Typical Situation

Benjamin calls into the helpdesk complaining about slow login times. IT has heard this problem a thousand times and deletes the profile. Benjie’s personalizations may be gone, but he can recreate them in his new profile. The important thing is that when he logs in again his problem will be fixed. Or will it?

The Myth Revealed

The first mental misstep is in thinking that the problem is inherently linked with the profile. The real issue lies within an application. A misbehaving application might have crashed while writing data to the profile or experienced some other issue while in transfer, resulting in inconsistent application data. This is frequently the cause of slow login times and crashed servers. The second profile misconception lies in the wording. The profile is not “corrupt” but rather “inconsistent” because only part of the profile data was written back.

So What Now?

There is no such thing as a “corrupted profile,” which hopefully will ease your mind. However “inconsistent profiles” may certainly give you a few headaches. Even in Windows’ manuals, Microsoft describes managing roaming profiles as a “daunting task.” But it doesn’t have to be.

Third party solutions offer software that can stream profiles to eliminate profile inconsistency, vastly reduce login and logout times, and minimize network utilization. Regardless of your environment size, profile virtualization will give new found resiliency, efficiency, not to mention ease-of-use, to your system.