Migrating to AD can be a pain, creating new users, migrating the profiles and settings.. oh dear – and keeping your users happy. If you have a small office with about 10 computers/users, there is an easy hack to make the users keep their profiles.

1. The procedure involves you creating the user accounts in AD;
2. Adding the computers to the AD;
3. Giving users full permissions of the profile folder they want to keep so for example “%SystemDrive%\Documents and Settings\andy”
4. Editing the registry;
5. Log in with the new username;

NOTE: these profiles are local computer profiles – they are not roaming profiles.
OK, join the computer to AD and create a username for the computer user, “andy” for example. Now log into that computer as a domain admin and give “andy” full control over “%SystemDrive%\Documents and Settings\andy”

Now log into that computer as “andy” the domain account so he gets a uid generated and a profile created – this will be an empty profile.

Profile generation for AD will create a new profile folder similar to this

"%SystemDrive%\Documents and Settings\andy.000"

Log onto the computer as admin again, now go to start > run > regedit > hit enter:

Now go to: HKLM>Software>Microsoft>Windows NT>CurrentVersion>ProfileList

here you will find all of the profiles on the computer, the nubers indicade uids, find the uid that has the same “ProfileImagePath” variable as your new domain user account for “andy”

"%SystemDrive%\Documents and Settings\andy.000"

now replace this with the local user account profile folder

"%SystemDrive%\Documents and Settings\andy"

Reboot the computer and let andy log in with his domain account, all of the profile settings will be there as before joining AD.

Experiment – may be you find some more hacks.
Please do tell me if anything is unclear.