What is the proper way to do a userprofile reset in Windows 11/in 2023

[salitoshater]

Hello,

I have been an IT administrator for several years, and the developments of recent times, especially since Windows 8, have their advantages and disadvantages.

One of the "disadvantages" for me is performing a user profile reset, specifically for domain users without roaming profiles. This used to be relatively easy in Windows XP and 7. Users would log out, optionally restart, delete the profile folder, and make the necessary changes to "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList".

With Windows 10/11, windows apps, business store or company store, azure/intune, work / school accounts, and other related topics, this measure has become increasingly complicated and, in my experience, partially unsuccessful. Some users end up with a corrupt user profile or encounter issues with launching standard apps (especially Shell Experience).

What do you think is the correct way to reset/renew a presumably corrupt user profile?

The information provided here is not helpful or, in my opinion, insufficient and not proper working- Fix a corrupted user profile in Windows - Microsoft Support

Does anyone have other official sources that could be helpful?

 

[Corday]

You could start a new user profile.

 

[Tekno Venus]

Been a while since I've done this, but always had good luck with delprof2 in the past on Windows 8/10, and I'd assume it would work OK on 11 Delprof2: User Profile Deletion Tool • Helge Klein

 

[salitoshater]

Thank you for your answers

You could start a new user profile.

Makes no sense in a domain environment. The users account name and SID is still the same, so if I delete the existing user profile and don't clean up all the remains (the %programdata%\Microsoft\Windows\AppRepository\Packages\*packagename directory, the reg key and several other places), the problems described will inevitably occur, especially with uwp apps. Creating a new domain user object is not an option and conflicts with AAD, licenses etc., and the effort is too high.

Delprof2 makes also no sense, this software is very outdated and doesn't touch the mentioned uwp apps (especially the uwp programdata and registry hklm part), even the creator itself wrote that on his webpage.

2018-10-09: Delprof2 has issues with UWP apps on Windows 10. Why? Windows 10 stores per-user settings in per-machine database files that are exclusively locked (almost?) all of the time. I consider this a design flaw on the part of Microsoft and I am not going to waste my time trying to work around that.

 

[Brianzx7]

Hello Salitoshater
I used to do what your steps listed at the top but not sure how this works today since the settings and the work account that gets created when an employee logs into Win11. Did you ever find a good way of doing this? I hate the idea of having to replace a users PC now just because their profile is corrupt. :/
~Brian

 

[Technohead]

To completely wipe and rebuild a profile (which is sometimes the best or only way) I've found the most reliable method is to delete the profile via via System->Advanced system settings->Advanced->User Profiles->Settings

To fix AAD, Work, InTune etc without deleting the actual profile I first log the user out of all accounts, if at all possible.
Then I delete relevant cached credentials from Control Panel->Credential Manager->Windows Credentials
Then I delete (or rename .old) the following folders;
%LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\OneAuth
%LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\IdentityCache
And I delete the contents of the following two folders;
%LOCALAPPDATA%\Packages\Microsoft.AAD.BrokerPlugin_cw5n1h2txyewy\AC\TokenBroker\Accounts
%LOCALAPPDATA%\Packages\Microsoft.Windows.CloudExperienceHost_cw5n1h2txyewy\AC\TokenBroker\Accounts

Sometimes I find I need to log out of the affected user profile (or reboot) and do the renaming/deleting as an account with local admin.