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Debugging user profiles and system policies

User profiles and system policies are tremendous tools for establishing and controlling the user environment. However, when they don't work right it's not always easy to figure out what's wrong. The good news is that there's a .dll file that can be used to create a log to identify problems. To enable and use the log file, follow these steps:

1. Rename the Userenv.dll file in the %Windir%\System32 directory to Usernv.orig or some other unique name of your choice.
2. Get out your NT CD and copy the original version of Userenv.dll to the %Windir%\System32 directory of the client computer that you want to debug. The version of the Userenv file must match the version of the operating system being used, so make sure that you don't use the file from NT Workstation on an NT Server or NT Enterprise machine, for example.
3. Start Regedt32 and locate the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon subkey.
4. Create a new value called UserEnvDebugLevel of type REG_DWORD. Assign the value 10002 in hexadecimal format.
5. Restart the computer with the .dll and registry changes in place.

For Windows NT Server 4.0 and Windows NT Server 4.0 Terminal Server SP4 and earlier, log information will be recorded in C:\Userenv.log and can be viewed with the text editor of your choice. For Terminal Server SP5 and SP6, log information will be recorded in %Systemroot%\System32\Userenv.log. Information displayed in the log includes: Profile Path, Profile Type, System Policy Path (useful for determining which server the Ntconfig.pol file was pulled from), whether the profile was successfully loaded and unloaded at the client, and if the remote profile is newer than the local profile.