Enabling Remote Desktop on Windows Server 2008 Core Edition

You’ve installed Windows Server 2008 Core Edition, so now what? For most Windows systems, remote desktop protocol (RDP) is the key mechanism to administer the server. While there are not many things that can be done locally on a Core server, it is still beneficial to have access to a session locally on the system.

Determining how to do this is easy enough from Microsoft KB article 555964, but before we do this, we want to focus on the options involved. RDP connections are available in two modes for Windows Core servers: (1) only allowing other Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista connections or (2) permitting Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008, and Windows Vista connections. The difference is network level authentication (NLA), which Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 support. NLA performs the authentication through various features of the newer products before starting the Remote Desktop session and passing the display to the client. (For more about NLA and the other components, read this blog post by the TechNet Performance Team.)

Once you decide on a mode, it’s quite easy to implement RDP on a Core system. If you want to use NLA for RDP connections to Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 systems, enter this command on the Core server:

Cscript %windir%\system32\SCRegEdit.wsf /ar 0

To not use NLA and allow connections from all RDP clients, perform the step above and add this line:

Cscript %windir%\system32\SCRegEdit.wsf /cs 0

The server will accept RDP connections based on the mode selected. You’re done!

Note: The commands in this tip will also work on the full installations if you want to roll them into a build script.

some different ways on how to force Group Policy processing remotely

Updating Microsoft Windows Group Policy settings on the local machine is not so hard with a tool such as Gpupdate, but updating these policies on remote domain computers is not possible from within any Microsoft Management Console (MMC) by default or with any Microsoft tool available so far. In this article we will show some tricks, scripts and free tools that makes this task possible – and even easy – for the network administrator.

Introduction

Most administrators know the problem of forcing Group Policy (GP) processing on remote computers. After configuring an important policy of some kind, we would sometimes like GP processing to occur immediately on client computers. The problem is that by default, the so called background processing “only” happens every 90 to 120 minutes (randomized) – if we want to force updates to occur right away we are on our own. Of course there is a reason why policies do not just update every 5 minutes or ‘real-time’. The load on Domain Controllers and the network would simply be too much to handle in most environments. But, if a very important security setting at some point needs to be pushed to a large number of clients “right away”, it’s nice to be prepared for such a situation.
What we basically want, is to make it possible for the administrator (Admin), from a central location (Admin workstation), to update policies on Computer1, Computer2 and/or Computer3 – and the user policies for User A, B and C - whenever the admin finds it necessary. See figure 1.

Figure 1: The scenario
We do have the wonderful Gpupdate tool built in to Microsoft Windows XP and newer – and we had Secedit on Windows 2000 systems - but it is unfortunately so, that unlike the Gpresult command, both Gpupdate and Secedit only handle local updates. Of course, if we have a deployment system set up already, like Microsoft Systems Management Server (SMS), we could use this system to distribute a small script that executes the necessary command for a group of users or computers.
If we do not have such a system on the network, we must try to be creative - because the alternative is to log on to all computers using tools like Remote Assistance, or sending an email to all users, to execute the Gpupdate command... So, let’s try to be creative then.

Issues

Before we get into more detail I just have to mention one common issue people have when trying to implement the methods mentioned in this article.
Firewall trouble:
Like with any other communication that is initiated from the network, packets that try to update policy settings on remote computers' will fail if the remote computers local firewall (like the one built in to Windows operating system from Windows XP Service Pack 2 and up) is not configured to allow such incoming traffic (from a given subnet, IP or whatever). The built in Windows firewall must be configured to allow the incoming traffic we want by using a Group Policy Object (GPO), so ironically, such a policy is the only one we definitely cannot force to firewall-enabled remote computers.
The policy settings that need to be enabled for all the mentioned methods in this article, is the following:
Computer Settings | Administrative Templates | Network | Network Connections | Windows Firewall | Domain Profile | “Windows Firewall: Allow remote administration exception”.
Other firewall devices between the central computer and the remote computers must be configured to comply with the above setting (see Help text on the mentioned policy in GPEDIT.MSC for port info etc.).
Administrator rights:
The user that initiates the processes on the remote computers must be a local administrator on those machines – or else it’s simply not going to work as expected.
After this is taken care of, let’s look at the free methods we have available.

Scripting

Scripts are free and shared heavily among IT professionals on the Internet – this is actually “Open Source” at its best. Microsoft has provided us with some built in opportunities to expand the capabilities of our operating systems (OS) and environments - in this article we will cover how these capabilities can be used in regards to updating GPs remotely.

Gpupdate & Secedit

First of all we should mention Gpupdate and Secedit, without those tools none of this would be possible. The scripts and tools mentioned here all assume that one of the tools exists on the remote client, depending on the OS version. As mentioned above, Secedit was delivered with Windows 2000 and Gpupdate took over from Windows XP and above, it has even survived the trip to Longhorn as it looks right now. In the following scripts I will focus on Gpupdate – we could check for OS version before calling either Gpupdate or Secedit, but that stuff can be added later without much work.
Gpupdate.exe resides in the “%windir%\system32” folder by default, so we don't need an absolute path to its location on the remote workstation. The tool can be called with a number of different switches:
Syntax:  Gpupdate [/Target:{Computer | User}] [/Force] [/Wait:] [/Logoff] [/Boot] [/Sync]

In the “do it yourself” HTML Application (HTA) and Windows Management Instrumentations (WMI) scripts we will focus on running Gpupdate without any switches – or with either “/Taget:Computer” (to update only computer related policies) or “/Target:User” (to update only user related policies). The other options could be included with some more work - but would we really use “/Logoff” or “/Boot”? This would mean that users could be logged off if required (software installation, folder redirection etc.) or the computer could even be restarted while the user is working. Is that really what we want? Anyway, we could just as well use tools like Shutdown.exe for that purpose – but my guess is that it’s not going to be popular out there (the users you know).

PsExec

The first method I’ll mention is very easy to implement and requires almost no scripting abilities. Why invent something that has already been invented, right? PsExec is developed by Mark Russinovich, the former owner of Sysinternals which was acquired by Microsoft in July 2006. It is currently available in version 1.73 and can be downloaded from Microsoft Technet here.
PsExec is ‘Heaven’ when talking remote execution, first of all because it does not require any agents installed on the remote computers. You need to specify a computer name and the command that should be executed as switches in a command prompt – that’s basically it! Behind the scenes a service is being installed ‘ad hoc’ remotely and removed again when the command has been executed.
A small tip is to place the PsExec.exe file in the “%windir%” directory, because then we don’t have to specify the complete path to this file when executing it from a command line etc.
To update group policies on the remote computer ‘Computername’ all we have to write is the following command: “PsExec \\Computername Gpupdate”. The user logged on to the remote computer will not see anything happening, but in the background Gpupdate will ‘refresh’ both user and computer policies and apply any missing settings. You would think that PsExec should run with the “-i" switch (interactive) to update the remote users specific user policies, but testing shows that this is not the case.

FLEX COMMAND

Well, the above mentioned method updates policies for a single user/computer only – how about updating an entire Organizational Unit (OU) by using PsExec and Gpupdate together? For that purpose I have created a “demo” script to show some of the possibilities we get with some ‘creative’ scripting. The script is called FLEX COMMAND and can be downloaded here. When opening the HTA file with a text editor like Notepad the code is revealed – no hidden magic or anything.
When FLEX COMMAND is started, it contacts the Active Directory (AD) domain of the computer it is executed on. Therefore it must be executed from a domain member – if not, no OU’s can be found of course.
Select an OU, whether computer objects in sub-OU’s should be handled, and if the tool should only handle machines that are “alive” (answering to WMI requests). The last thing to do is to insert the command line we want to execute on the local machine for each computer object found in the OU selected. The text string “{C}” must be included; this will be replaced by the name of the computer when the script is looping through the computer objects.

Figure 2: FLEX COMMAND in action
Let’s say that the OU “MyComputers” contains only 3 computers: Computer1, Computer2 and Computer3. The command we have typed in, “psexec \\{C} gpupdate”, is then translated into the following 3 commands: “psexec \\computer1 gpupdate”, “psexec \\computer2 gpupdate”, “psexec \\computer3 gpupdate” – all commands will be executed consecutively (if the computers are alive) and remote policies should be updated.
The tool could be modified to get the computers from a file (txt, csv, xls etc.), a database, a specific security group in AD, a manual selection from a list or whatever the need would be. The way the script executes the processes/commands could also be modified, but this demo script is mainly to show the possibilities we have.
The script is freely delivered ‘as-is’ for you to test, use and modify as you please - more info here.

Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI)

Ok, PsExec is nice, but do we have a “do it yourself” method so I can customize the solution to fit my environment? Yes, as a matter of fact we do! WMI is extremely powerful and pretty easy to handle after a few hours of studying. With WMI, a tamed firewall scenario and administrative rights in place, almost anything is possible in a Windows environment – even remote shut down, restart or execution of commands.
I have created another script for demo purposes, called OU GPUPDATE. This HTA script carries some different techniques “under the hood” – it’s actually just a small modification of FLEX COMMAND. First of all it looks up the OU structure in AD (the top dropdown list), it gives the user the option to hit computer objects in sub-OU’s too, to run Gpupdate with “/Target:User” or “/Target:Computer” or without any switches. Only computers that are “alive” (responds to WMI requests) will be hit by default.

Figure 3: Select what to update – user settings, computer settings or both
The script is freely delivered ‘as-is’ for you to test, use and modify as you please. The script can be downloaded here.

Remote scripting

Besides WMI, we have the option to use ‘plain’ remote scripting (VBScript). This must be enabled by setting one value in the HKLM part of the involved computers' registry databases, the script engines must be “remote scripting” enabled, and from that point the rest is pretty straight forward. The procedure is to copy a script file to the remote host (this script should perform Gpupdate as required), and afterwards send a VBScript command that executes the script file remotely.
Jeremy Moskowitz, a Microsoft Group Policy MVP, mentions this procedure briefly in his book “Group Policy, Profiles, and IntelliMirror for Windows 2003, Windows 2000, and Windows XP”, see his website.

RGPREFRESH

RGPREFRESH is a tool developed by Darren Mar-Elia. Darren is a Microsoft Group Policy Most Valuable Professional (MVP), see his website. His tool uses WMI behind the scenes and executes either Secedit or Gpupdate as needed on the remote host, with the command line switches selected by the user. These switches give you the same possibilities as if you were using the tool locally.
Darren's tool handles one machine at the time, but combined with a tool like FLEX COMMAND (as “wrapper”) the tool can hit an entire OU of a computer with a few clicks… Both RGPREFRESH and PsExec could also be combined with DSQUERY, FOR and other command line utilities to execute on more than one host at the time.

Figure 4: The RGPREFRESH options
The tool can be downloaded for free from this webpage.

Specops Gpupdate

Special Operations Software, Specops, is an international software vendor, offering management products enhancing Active Directory and Group Policy based technology. The company has released their own remote policy updating solution, and the best part is that it is completely free to use. The current version of Specops Gpupdate is 1.0.2.13 (2006-10-25) and the utility can be downloaded here. This tool not only brings the functionality we have developed in the above scripts, but also adds some more management features. Let’s take a look at this nice utility…
Installing Specops Gpupdate
Installing the MSI application is very easy; all it requires is the Active Directory Users & Computers (ADUC) MMC and the Microsoft .NET Framework version 2.0.

Figure 5: The install process is as simple as most MSI package installations (next, next, next)
After installing the MSI file nothing is changed in the GUI, only “Add/Remove Programs” tell us that Specops is installed. So we have to perform an additional task for the magic to appear…
Active Directory User & Computers extended
The first time Specops Gpupdate is installed in the AD Forest, a special command must be run:
“%CommonProgramFiles%\Specopssoft\Specops ADUC Extension\SpecopsAducMenuExtensionInstaller.exe” /add
This is not a schema update, even though you must be Enterprise Admin to run this. This update is completely reversible, just run it again with the “/remove” switch instead. What it does is to register so called “Display Specifiers” to extend the view from within ADUC.
When right clicking an OU or a computer object, four new options are added: Gpupdate, Restart, Shut down and Start. It’s possible to make a selection of multiple computers and OU’s by holding down [Ctrl] while left clicking the wanted objects.

Figure 6: ADUC MMC extended
If you are wondering, as I did, if the changes also apply to non-DC’s (or management computers ), the answer is: Yes! After installing the Windows Server 2003 Admin Pack Service Pack 1 Administration Tools Pack on a Windows XP Professional client, the .NET Framework 2.0 and Specops Gpupdate, the management console looked just as nice as on the DC and had the same features available.
The Gpupdate option
The first option we have is to perform a Gpupdate command remotely on the selected computers. After choosing Gpupdate we must confirm the selection, see figure 7, and select if we want to use the force option.

Figure 7
After clicking OK a dynamic graph is presented, see figure 8, and a status report on how the update went.

Figure 8
The Restart and Shutdown option
The next two options, ‘Restart’ and ‘Shutdown’ are both “nice to have” management features, right where we need them, in ADUC. We can force the restart or shutdown, specify the number of seconds the user will have to close any open applications and send the user a customized message. Scripting this is not that hard to do using WMI or sending Shutdown.exe with the proper switches – but with Specops Gpupdate we get this functionality for free, no additional work to be done.

Figure 9: The confirm restart dialog
The Start option
The last of the four options, called ‘Start’, is actually Wake on LAN (WOL) functionality built-in to ADUC. When selecting and confirming this, see figure 10, so called Magic packets are sent against the clients MAC address to make them boot. WOL must be supported by the BIOS of computers of course. Specops Gpupdate communicates with Microsoft DHCP servers in the enterprise to find the info needed to perform this process, so it’s only possible to wake DHCP clients and only in network environments with Microsoft DHCP servers deployed.

Figure 10: Confirm starting remote WOL enabled computers
By the way, scripting WOL is actually possible too, but showing how to do this is far beyond the scope of this article.



Thanks:

Jakob H. Heidelberg is an MVP: Enterprise Security, MCSA/MCSE: Security/Messaging, MCDST, MCTS, MCITP, MCT, CCNA, and a Certified Ethical Hacker, that works as a System Consultant for Interprise Consulting A/S, a Microsoft Gold Partner based in Denmark. Jakob is engaged as a writer at the largest Microsoft online community for Danish IT pros, it-experts.dk. He also writes on his own blog, and likes to catch up on as much new stuff as possible within the Microsoft world, but currently specializes in messaging, monitoring and security issues

useful and free Windows system tools for your Windows XP or Vista

useful and free Windows system tools

 IZArc

Not everyone distributes compressed files in the zip format - thankfully IZArccan read dozens of formats (including zip, of course). It's also handy at creating customised archives, with support for 256-bit encryption, self-extraction and splitting large archives for distribution in manageable chunks.

 File Shredder

Securely delete files from your hard drive, and cover your tracks by shredding the free space too with File Shredder, a simple, yet effective, data destruction tool.

 EASUS Partition Master Home Edition

EASUS Partition Master Home Edition is a freebie which enables you to not only partition without data loss within Windows, it also boasts partition and disk copy wizards too, making it easy to clone hard drives or quickly back them up.

 Autoruns

Windows' built-in msconfig tool is all well and good, but if you want complete control over what starts with your PC, then Autoruns, a free tool from The Artists Formerly Known As SysInternals, is an essential addition to your toolkit. You can delete as well as disable start-up items, plus access other start-up zones too.

 ISO Recorder

ISO Recorder is a fabulous tool which makes it easy to burn discs from ISO images downloaded from the internet (such as Linux distributions), but it's also able to back up uncopy protected CDs and DVDs to ISO format too.

DAEMON Tools Lite

Tired of constant disc-swapping or hunting for lost DVDs? DAEMON Tools Lite creates up to four virtual CD/DVD drives that can access disc image files (including ISO and IMG) as if you'd inserted the discs themselves. Oh, and it's quicker than accessing the real thing too.

 CCleaner

There's only so much crap that Windows' own Disk Cleanup tool can handle - if you want a tool that does a more thorough job, CCleaner is that program. Use its Registry cleaning tool with care, though.

 Free Registry Defrag

You can't rely on Registry cleaners to always get it right when cleaning out your Registry. Deleting so-called "problem" entries is only half the job anyway - Free Registry Defrag won't delete anything from your Registry, but it will compact and defragment the contents of your Registry files so they perform quicker. There's an element of risk with any Registry cleaning exercise - (visit regrecovery before you begin, just in case.)

Defraggler

Most defrag tools will only let you defrag entire partitions or drives; Defragglerlets you analyse your drive and then pick individual files and folders to defragment - perfect if you're running on a tight schedule.

Ultimate Windows Tweaker

Vista users casting a jealous glance at XP's TweakUI PowerToy can stop being envious: the recently released free app Ultimate Windows Tweakerpacks in over 130 tweaks into a single 380KB executable file - no installation necessary.

Change Text on XP Start Button

Step 1 - Modify Explorer.exe File

In order to make the changes, the file explorer.exe located at C:\Windows needs to be edited. 

Since explorer.exe is a binary file it requires a special editor. For purposes of this article I have used Resource Hacker. Resource HackerTM is a freeware utility to view, modify, rename, add, delete and extract resources in 32bit Windows executables and resource files (*.res). It incorporates an internal resource script compiler and decompiler and works on Microsoft Windows 95/98/ME, Windows NT, Windows 2000 and Windows XP operating systems.

get this from http://delphi.icm.edu.pl/ftp/tools/ResHack.zip

The first step is to make a backup copy of the file explorer.exe located at C:\Windows\explorer. Place it in a folder somewhere on your hard drive where it will be safe. Start Resource Hacker and open explorer.exe located at C:\Windows\explorer.exe.

The category we are going to be using is "String Table". Expand it by clicking the plus sign then navigate down to and expand string 37 followed by highlighting 1033. If you are using the Classic Layout rather than the XP Layout, use number 38. The right hand pane will display the stringtable. We’re going to modify item 578, currently showing the word “start” just as it displays on the current Start button.

There is no magic here. Just double click on the word “start” so that it’s highlighted, making sure the quotation marks are not part of the highlight. They need to remain in place, surrounding the new text that you’ll type. Go ahead and type your new entry. In my case I used Click Me!

You’ll notice that after the new text string has been entered the Compile Script button that was grayed out is now active. I won’t get into what’s involved in compiling a script, but suffice it to say it’s going to make this exercise worthwhile. Click Compile Script and then save the altered file using the Save As command on the File Menu. Do not use the Save command – Make sure to use the Save As command and choose a name for the file. Save the newly named file to C:\Windows.


Step 2 – Modify the Registry

!!!make a backup of your registry before making changes!!!

Now that the modified explorer.exe has been created it’s necessary to modify the registry so the file will be recognized when the user logs on to the system. If you don’t know how to access the registry I’m not sure this article is for you, but just in case it’s a temporary memory lapse, go to Start (soon to be something else) Run and type regedit in the Open field. Navigate to:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\ SOFTWARE\ Microsoft\ Windows NT\ CurrentVersion\ Winlogon

In the right pane, double click the "Shell" entry to open the Edit String dialog box. In Value data: line, enter the name that was used to save the modified explorer.exe file. Click OK.

Close Registry Editor and either log off the system and log back in, or reboot the entire system if that’s your preference. If all went as planned you should see your new Start button with the revised text.

Add Your name on taskbar

Heres a trick to add up ur name in place of AM and PM beside time and make urself to feel proud among ur group of frnds.
Its simple


Start -> Control Pannel -> Regional and LAnguage option ->

 Customize (beside English US) ->

Go to TIME tab -> Change AM symbol and PM symbol from AM and PM to ur name -> 

Apply -> Ok ...

IS it changed ??? Might be not ...Now go to time in taskbar and Double Click it to open "Date and time property" 

...Look place where time chnges in digital form i.e. 02:47:52 AM , click to arrow to cnage the AM or PM by selecting and press arrow. It will Show ur name or name that was entered by u,

 Apply -> OK

Thats it

Realtek High Definition Audio Driver for Windows 7

After I installed Windows 7 beta on my HP Pavilion DV6500, I was not able to use some of the audio features like the front headphone audio-out jack, microphone audio-in jack etc. This is because of the old Realtek HD Audio Driver which was not compatible with Windows 7.

Realtek has added support for Windows 7 and you can download the new version R2.16

Download Realtek HD Audio Codec Driver for Windows 7

This supports Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP and other earlier OS for both 32-bit x86 and 64-bit x64 OS

They also have ATI HDMI Audio Device driver and 3D SoundBack which restores audio effects, including surround sound, reverberation, and spatial effects, for legacy game titles when running on Windows Vista.

How To Recover a Damaged User Profile in XP

Windows XP is a really good operating system as long as it is running fine, but when it doesn't, you have to scurry around looking for solutions to get it back to normal. Once in a while, it so happens that you get a message that reads something like this:

Windows cannot load your profile because it may be corrupted. You may log in using a temporary User Profile.

Or

The system has recovered from a serious error.
This happens when the user profile becomes damaged.

Empty Windows XP desktop after logging in post a damaged user profile 


Windows does boot up, but when you arrive at the desktop, you are shocked to find that the desktop items are missing. That's not all; you find that all the personal settings such as theme, wallpaper, and icons are gone too. As if this is not enough, you find that the my Documents folder doesn't contain any of your documents. Internet Explorer bookmarks and Outlook Express personal settings are gone too, along with your emails. Sounds nightmarish, doesn't it? Don't worry, today we will show you how to get everything back in order.

We will first explain how the above scenario takes place and the cause for it. The reason behind such a situation is that the user profile gets damaged (as we mentioned earlier). A user profile contains all the files and settings for a particular user, and when there are many users using a Windows XP computer, there are as many user profiles, each with its own unique settings. When a user profile gets damaged (due to various reasons such as the file system getting corrupted), Windows XP creates a new user profile and logs you into this new profile. The new profile will be that of a user logging in for the first time  - bland and devoid of any customizations.

The Rescue Work

You have to login as an administrator to do the following; in other words, the user needs to have administrative rights. To do this, you must log off and then log on to the default administrator account.

Start by Securing Your Data

Since your data in the original account is your priority, you need to secure it first and only then proceed further. To start the backup process, open Windows Explorer and go to C:\Documents and Settings folder. Now locate and then open your original account folder. You will be able to view all the files and folders in the original user profile as seen in the screenshot. You must configure Windows Explorer to show hidden and system files before doing this.

You can now back up all the files and folders inside this folder to another location in another drive. Probably the first folder would be your my Documents folder, which you can see as UserName's Documents (like Temp's Documents). You can also copy the contents of the Favorites folder.

Outlook Express users can find the files related to their emails at a location such as "Local
Settings\Application Data\Identities\ {D10E00AF-FC98-4E44-B5CC-F13E6D3AE304} \Microsoft\Outlook Express" folder, as seen above.

Address Book is another important thing you may want to back up. You can find the Address Book file in "Application Data\Microsoft\Address Book" folder. Outlook 2000/XP users will find the PST file in the "Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook" folder.

After you are done backing up your most important files, you can proceed with the recovery procedure. We shall start with System Restore.

Plan A:  System restore

System Restore utility allows you to return the computer to a state it was in an earlier time period. It can therefore allow you to recover a damaged user profile, if the damage is not too extensive.

System Restore utility can be found in Start > All Programs > Accessories > System Tools. After it is launched, you can see the Welcome to System Restore page, where you can select "Restore my computer to an earlier time" and click Next.

In the next page, you can select a Restore Point when your computer did not have any problem and click Next. You are given a confirmation message, and you must click Next to start the restore operation. The system will restart after the System Restore operation is complete, and you can then attempt to log on to your original user account.

Before attempting System Restore, we would like to tell you a few things. If there are multiple user accounts on the system, returning to a previous Restore Point will return all the user profiles to the earlier state. If the damage to the user profile is due to something like a bad sector on a hard drive, then System Restore will not be able to correct the problem.

The above-mentioned process was plan A.

If this solution works, then things should look the way they did before with all your user profile settings and data restored. If it doesn't work, then we shall go to Plan B.

But before that, you must undo the System Restore operation. To do that, launch System Restore again. This time around, you will see a new option "Undo my last restoration." Select this option and click Next. Follow the instructions to undo the System Restore operation.

Plan B: Copy your user profile

In this method, you can try to restore the user profile by creating a new account with administrative privileges. Here is how you can create an administrative account. Open the Control Panel and then open User Accounts.

Make sure that you select Computer Administrator as the account type. Click Create Account to create the new user account.

You will now have to copy the old user profile to this newly created one. Though this may sound a little complicated, it is actually a simple process. Log onto the newly created user account and log off. Log back into the administrative account.

Open System Properties from the Control Panel and select Advanced tab.

Click the Settings button in the User Profiles section. You can now see a User Profiles window that lists the different user profiles present on your computer.

You can see the old user profile here (in this case, it is Temp). Select the old profile in the list and click "Copy To" button. In the next window, click the Browse button, locate the Documents and Settings folder, and select the new account. Click OK. You will see a confirmation dialog box informing you that the original files will be deleted and you will be prompted to confirm the copy operation. Click Yes.

Once the copying is done, close the User Profiles and System Properties window, and log off. You can now attempt to log on to the new account again. If this method works, well, then things should be back to normal.

If, even after doing the above, you are still not able to log on to your account, then we will have to go to Plan C. But before we move on, you need to delete the new user account and user profile. Log on to the Administrator account, open User Profiles and click Delete. Then, open User Accounts in the Control Panel and delete the new account and its files.

Plan C: Moving to a new user profile manually

In this method, you will create a new account and a new user profile. You can then manually copy your data files and other parts of the user profile from the original to the new one. Please note that when you move to a new user profile in this manner, you will lose all the personalized settings such as themes, wallpaper, and icons.

First, create a new account as we did before. Log on to it to create a default new profile and then log off again. Log on back to the Administrator account. Open Windows Explorer and go to C:\Documents and Settings folder. Locate and open your original account folder. Make sure that you have enabled viewing of hidden system files and folders to be able to view all the files present in that folder.

Copy the contents of the folder containing the data that you want to move to the new user profile. In our case, we will copy the contents of C:\Documents and Settings\Temp\Temp's Documents folder to the C:\Documents and Settings\JCL\JCL's Documents folder. Copy the contents of the Favorites, Outlook Express (or Outlook), and Address Book folders.

Make sure that you do not copy any file related to the operating system, as there is a chance that  this may be the root cause of your problem. You should not therefore copy Ntuser.dat, Ntuser.pol, or Ntuser.ini from the original profile to the new one.

After you are done copying the files and folders, log out of the Administrator account and log on to the new user account. You should now be able to access all your data files as you did before and also most of your applications. You may need to reinstall or reconfigure some of the applications, though. You will also need to recreate all your personalized settings.

Clean up the old user profile

After you are done restoring the new user profile, you no longer require the files and folders of the old profile and can get rid of them. You can do it by once again opening the User Profiles window, selecting them from the list of profiles, and clicking the Delete button.

Backing up the user profile automatically

After having been through the nightmarish experience of a damaged user profile, you might not want to go through it again. We will find out how to safeguard against a repeat of such a scenario. This can be done by making Windows XP believe that the local user profile is a roaming user profile. The advantage of this is that Windows XP will back up your user profile each time you log off. To achieve this, you have to log out of your new account and log in to your Administrator account. Open User Profiles window in System Properties, select the new user profile, click Copy To button and type the name of a folder on another drive in the Copy Profile To text box.

After this procedure is done, open Computer Management by simply running "compmgmt.msc" (without the quotes). Go to System Tools\Local Users and Groups\Users folder. Next, double-click on your account name and select the Profile tab. Type the path to the backup in the Profile Path text box, as shown in the next screenshot.

We are done. This is just one more step towards a crash-free Windows and one thing less to worry about.

Thanks To:Jayesh Limaye,from techtree

Remove Regsvr.exe or worm_delf.fkz

Remove virus Manually as it eats up Ur my empty hard disk space of around 700 MB 

This virus is know popularly as regsvr.exe virus, or as new folder.exe virus and most people identify this one by seeing autorun.inf file on their pen drives, But trend microidentified it as WORM_DELF.FKZ. It is spreading mostly using this pen drives as the medium.



Manual Process of removal

I prefer manual process simply because it gives me option to learn new things in the process.

1.Cut The Supply Line

• Search for autorun.inf file. It is a read only file so you will have to change it to normal by right clicking the file , selecting the properties and un-check the read only option.
  
• Open the file in notepad and delete everything and save the file.
  
• Now change the file status back to read only mode so that the virus could not get access again.
  
  

• Click start->run and type msconfig and click ok
  
• Go to startup tab look for regsvr and uncheck the option click OK.
  
• Click on Exit without Restart, cause there are still few things we need to do before we can restart the PC.
  
• Now go to control panel -> scheduled tasks, and delete the At1 task listed their.
  

2.Open The Gates Of Castle

• Click on start -> run and type gpedit.msc and click Ok.
  
  
  
  
  • If you are Windows XP Home Edition user you might not have gpedit.msc in that case download and install it from Windows XP Home Edition: gpedit.msc and then follow these steps.
    
  • Go to users configuration->Administrative templates->system
    
  • Find “prevent access to registry editing tools” and change the option to disable.
    
  
  
  Once you do this you have registry access back.3.Launch The Attack At Heart Of Castle
  
  • Click on start->run and type regedit and click ok
    
  • Go to edit->find and start the search for regsvr.exe,
    
    
    
    
    • Delete all the occurrence of regsvr.exe; remember to take a backup before deleting. KEEP IN MIND regsvr32.exe is not to be deleted.Delete regsvr.exe occurrences ONLY.
      
    
    At one ore two places you will find it after explorer.exe in theses cases only delete the regsvr.exe part and not the whole part. E.g. Shell = “Explorer.exe regsvr.exe” the just delete the regsvr.exe and leave the explorer.exe
    
    4.Seek And Destroy the enemy soldiers, no one should be left behind
    
    • Click on start->search->for files and folders.
      
    • Their click all files and folders
      
    • Type “*.exe” as filename to search for
      
    • Click on ‘when was it modified ‘ option and select the specify date option
    • Type from date as 1/31/2008 and also type To date as 1/31/2008
      
      
      
      
      • Now hit search and wait for all the exe’s to show up.
        
      • Once search is over select all the exe files and shift+delete the files, caution must be taken so that you don’t delete the legitimate exe file that you have installed on 31st January.
        
      • Also selecting lot of files together might make your computer unresponsive so delete them in small bunches.
        
      • Also find and delete regsvr.exe, svchost .exe( notice an extra space between the svchost and .exe)
        
        
        Now do a cold reboot (ie press the reboot button instead) and you are done