The Bizarreness of Roaming Profiles and Their Lingering Odour

[CodeDragon]

I work for a college and, due to circumstances that I won't bore you with, we've just had a new server installed.

We took this opportunity to move from using roaming profiles for managing software to having all packages installed locally on machines.

Whilst the old server was limping along we removed all the machines from the domain and scrubbed their local profile dirs leaving only local admin accounts. We then installed Office 2000 locally on all machines. The problem now is that even when logged in as a local admin (or limited user for that matter) the machines are trying to install office components from the server, even though they were working fine when we first did the installs (we checked, even with the server down at one point). Some are only showing Excel to be installed, some just Publisher, others with components that require Disk 1 to be installed but none of the major disk 1 apps installed... you get the idea.

Now, there are only two problems remaining here: 1, if it's a problem with the server then we have to ask someone else to fix it (long and complicated story, don't ask) because we don't have admin access to it any more. 2, we need these machines ASAP.

Any suggestions/questions/funny remarks?

[corturbra]

Did you remove all traces of the previous version of Office before installing with a local copy?

If not and the previous version was installed from a network location, could be that the installer file is still looking for the network version even if you have a CD in the drive.

Installing for the first time would let you run it from the CD.

First impressions would say it's not a server issue.

[CodeDragon]

Did you remove all traces of the previous version of Office before installing with a local copy?

If not and the previous version was installed from a network location, could be that the installer file is still looking for the network version even if you have a CD in the drive.

Installing for the first time would let you run it from the CD.

First impressions would say it's not a server issue.

In answer to your question, yes, we did.

However, we've found the cause of the problem. It was a server issue, but not a fault per se. The engineers who installed the server have created a login script which deletes all managed software and profile directories from client machines when a network user logs in. It was this that was removing all the office installations.

Thanks anyway.