Tag Archives: Windows Vista

Shutdown.exe has a GUI

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Shutdown.exe is the extremley useful built-in command line utility to shutdown, restart or logoff your computer. It has several switches to control what you want to do, but unusually for a command line utility, it also has a very nice, simple GUI also.

Enter the following into your command prompt to launch the program with its GUI: Shutdown.exe -i

As you can see from the image above, there are several options, all of which you can do with switches on the command line also. What you can do with the GUI however, is paste in a crlf separated list of computer names, or use the ‘Browse’ facility to search for and choose computers to shutdown from your directory.

Very nice.

Deleting Profiles Correctly – Server 2008

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This also applies to Windows Vista and Windows 7.

User profiles are normally stored in C:\Users\<username>. Some people might think that to delete profiles (to clear up disk space, or if the profile becomes corrupted), you delete the <username> folder in the Users folder and all is done. If you simply do this, registry keys will be left in the registry that are associated with the profile, and if a user whose profile folder you’ve deleted tries to log on, they will receive a temporary, un-saveable profile.

Doing things properly

  • Open system settings (right click on computer and choose properties).
  • Open Advanced System Settings (to the left of the system settings window.
  • Click on the Advanced tab.
  • Click the ‘Settings’ button under User Profiles.
  • Select the user profile you want to remove from the list that appears in the User Profiles window.
  • Press Delete.

If it’s too late….

If you’ve already deleted the user’s profile folder without deleteing the profile properly,you can remove the associated registry keys:

  • Open Registry Editor (run regedit)
  • Navigate to
    HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList
  • Delete any keys with reference to the deleted user’s profile.
  • The keys have pretty unreadable names, but each key has a string value called ‘ProfileImagePath’ that has the familiar username in there.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList