Windows 2000 maintains a user’s desktop configuration and environment settings in what is called a user profile. Settings found in a user profile include things like the wallpaper the user has set, the placement of the icons on their desktop, mouse settings and so forth. In Windows 2000, a user’s profile can be found under the folder Documents and Settings, in a folder that maps to their user name.
If the system has been upgraded from NT 4, however, profiles will still be found under the %systemroot%\profiles folder. By default, all user profiles are local. That means that when a user logs on to a system for the first time, they receive a new profile, and any changes they make are stored on that machine only. By contrast, you can also store user profiles on a server such that they follow users as they move from machine to machine. These are referred to as roaming profiles. When a user logs off a system, their settings (including any changes they have made) are saved back to the central server. Note that certain folders, such as My Pictures and My Documents, are part of the user profile. As such, if you are using roaming profiles, and a user has a number of large files in these folders, it can cause significant network disruption. However, Windows 2000 does keep a locally cached copy of roaming profiles on a system. As such, if a user has a large roaming profile and usually uses the same machine, only the changes are copied back and forth, not the entire profile every time they log on. Roaming profiles are configured in the properties of a user account (on the Profile tab), by providing a UNC path to where the profile is stored such as \\server2\profiles\dan. In order to make things simpler, consider setting user accounts up for roaming profiles by using the %username% variable instead of the actual user name. This will automatically create a profile location on the server with the same name as that of the user (if you do this, only the administrator and user will have full control over the profile by default if the target volume is formatted NTFS). If you want to take an existing local profile and change it to roaming, you must set the properties on the user account as mentioned above, as well as copy the local profile to the server using the Copy To button on the Profiles tab in the System Program.
As in NT 4, you can still make a profile mandatory (unchangeable) by renaming the Ntuser.dat file in the profile to Ntuser.man.
