Active Directory – How to Join Domain and Still Maintain Settings from Unjoined User Profile

I highly recommend the free open source tool, SetACL.

http://helgeklein.com/setacl/examples/managing-file-system-permissions-with-setacl-exe/#example-5-migrating-permissions-between-domains

I'm going to assume that SAT and DFW do not have any kind of trust, and SAT\USER1 probably has a vastly different SID than DFW\USER1. Permissions in NTFS are all stored by SID, not username. This can complicate things.

Learn the backup and restore commands first, and backup the permissions on all your servers to a safe place. You may need to come up with your own solution where you backup the existing permissions to an SDDL file, search and replace the domain names or SIDs, and then restore that in the new domain.

Method 1 (easy and safe)

• Open up "Control Panel | System and Security | System"
• In the dialog click on "Advanced system settings" (requires Admin rights)
• The "System Properties" dialog will be displayed
• Make sure you are in the "Advanced" register
• In the "User Profiles" section click on "Settings"
• The "User Profiles" dialog is displayed
• Select the account. Hit Delete.

Method 2 (slight variation of method 1)

• Start | Run
• sysdm.cpl
• switch to register "Advanced"
• In the "User Profiles" section click on "Settings"
• The "User Profiles" dialog is displayed
• Select the account. Hit Delete.

The greyed out button possibly means that the registry hive has not been released by the operating system, as pointed out by @joeqwerty in the comments.

Method 3 (manual and prone to errors)

Delete the C:\Users\[ACCOUNT] directory. That leaves some registry entries behind that have to be manually deleted as follows.

• Open Regedit with Administrator Permissions (Runas Administrator)
• Select the HKEY_USERS branch
• Search for the Domain Account without the domain (e.g. login = DOMAIN\ACCOUNT then search for ACCOUNT)
• Keep on searching until the status bar shows Computer\HKEY_USERS\[SID]\Software\Microsoft\Windwos\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Shell Folders
• There should be a large list of your ACCOUNTs folders e.g. C:\Users\ACCOUNT\Desktop

You are in the right HKEY_USERS\[SID]\Software\Microsoft\Windwos\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Shell Folders branch if the ACCOUNT in "Shell Folders" matches the ACCOUNT you just manually deleted form the C:\Users\[ACCOUNT] directory. This branch [SID] can be exported and/or deleted to clean up the last of the user profile.