Exploring User Profiles

Windows XP Professional loads users’ profiles when they log on to the computer and unloads their profiles when they log off. A user profile contains a registry hive that contains per-user settings, and folders that contain documents and data files. The following section, "Profile Hives," describes the registry hive that the operating system loads. The section "Profile Folders" describes the folders in a user profile.

Before delving into the contents of user profiles, knowing their location on the file system is useful. The default location is different from what it was in Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 or other operating systems of that era. Remember that Windows NT 4.0 stored user profiles in %SYSTEMROOT%\Profiles, but this location ...

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