Disabling Known Folders

Administrators who want to minimize user confusion around known folders being recreated by applications can disable specific known folders in Windows 7 by enabling and configuring the following Group Policy setting:

For example, the Sample Videos known folder has the Known Folder ID of {440fcffd-a92b- 4739-ae1a-d4a54907c53f} and the Canonical ID name of SampleVideos. By enabling this policy setting and specifying either the Known Folder ID or Canonical ID of this folder, you can prevent the folder from being created using the known folder API. If the folder already exists before the policy setting is applied, the folder must be deleted manually (the policy only blocks the creation of the folder).

Warning Disabling a known folder can introduce application compatibility issues for applications that depend on the folder.

Moving User Profiles

In previous versions of Windows, the Moveuser utility (part of the Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit Tools) can be used to map an existing local user account profile to a new domain account profile when a computer in a workgroup is being joined to a domain. The Moveuser utility can also be used to map an existing domain account profile to a new domain account profile. In Windows Vista and later versions, however, Moveuser will not work and has been replaced by a downloadable User Profile Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) provider. For more information on obtaining this WMI provider, see Microsoft Knowledge Base article 930955, "Moveuser.exe Is Incompatible with Windows Vista and Is Replaced by the New Win32_UserProfile WMI Functionality," at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/930955.