What does “Use mandatory profiles on the RD Session Host server” do

group-policyremote-desktop-serviceswindows-server-2008-r2

The description for "Use mandatory profiles on the RD Session Host server" is a little ambiguous:

This policy setting allows you to specify whether Remote Desktop
Services uses a mandatory profile for all users connecting remotely to
the RD Session Host server.

If you enable this policy setting, Remote Desktop Services uses the
path specified in the Set path for Remote Desktop Services Roaming
User Profile policy setting as the root folder for the mandatory user
profile. All users connecting remotely to the RD Session Host server
use the same user profile.

If you disable or do not configure this policy setting, mandatory user
profiles are not used by users connecting remotely to the RD Session
Host server.

I have a situation where only some users need to use mandatory profiles for logging in to a Remote Desktop Session Host. If I have some users with ntuser.dat and some users ntuser.man in their roaming profile what will RD Session Host do

  1. To a user who has ntuser.man in their roaming profile and has the setting set to Disabled?
  2. To a user who has ntuser.dat in their roaming profile and has the setting set to Enabled?

Best Answer

In the first case, the profile with the .man extension should behave as a mandatory user profile, regardless of the state of the Group Policy setting.

As I understand, in the second case, the user's profile (with the ntuser.dat) will be ignored and will not be used. When using this GPO, you must also configure the setting:

Set path for Remote Desktop Services Roaming User Profile

which provides the path to a profile which will be used in preference to any other profiles related to the user (local, roaming profile on the network etc.) by all users who log on to the server.

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