USMT will do this for you, but it can take a lot of trial and error to get exactly what you need.
When picking up a profile, you would run ScanState with the /ui:domain\username switch. I believe that stands for User Include. I think that picks up only that user, so you could do this as an admin on their desktop without being logged in as that user.
If all you want is that user's account/folder you may also have to look at using a Config.xml file to include or exclude various file, folders and settings. This page on Technet contains a sample XML file that can be modified.
and this will generate a configuration file for you. You can then view this file to see if what you need is going to be copied etc. Modify this file so that only the required settings and files will be moved and then use this file as an argument to ScanState:
In an ideal world, all that is left is to run LoadState on the new PC. Because you will only have backed up what you need, the Load should not need any fancy switches:
LoadState \\fileserver\mystore
should be enough. That should create the user's profile on the new PC and when they next log in they should see their files on the desktop and so on.
In my experience though, I spent days trying to configure all sorts of fancy settings to migrate over to their new desktop half of which I could never get to work properly. And then it took an hour to backup a profile, 10 minutes to move onto a fileshare and another hour to load the new profile. And then it would fail somewhere for no reason.
In the end, we only had 100 PCs to replace over the course of 2 months so we just reset the users passwords and logged in as them to set up pristine new profiles.
As you said it is a domain client, I am supposing that it is part of Active directory domain. This is quite possible programatically. You can connect to you ldap server and can do a lot of operations like creating users, changing passwords etc.
I'm going to assume that, in this case, you aren't doing centrally managed profiles, in other words, every user has their own local home directory on every machine they log into?
I've never heard of this being possible. If you figure it out, I'd love to hear about it.
By far the easiest way to accomplish what you are trying to do, is to have an administrator reset the user's domain password. Then log on to the new desktop with that password, which creates the account. Then log off, reset the password again, and make sure somebody informs the user before they try to log in.
When a new profile is being created on a computer for a domain user, there's a lot that happens inside the registry as well as on the filesystem. Be mindful of that -- it's not sufficient to simply copy the user profile.
There is always option to tweak "Default User" profile for that purpose. If you copy stuff from desktop/ my documents to default user\desktop and default user\my documents it will be copied over when person will login for the first time. After that you have to however make sure to delete those files, otherwise each person login to that machine for the first time will get it. We used this technique for few years now while migrating users from pc to pc (in fact we copy whole profile, so that user feels like he haven't moved at all).
USMT will do this for you, but it can take a lot of trial and error to get exactly what you need.
When picking up a profile, you would run ScanState with the /ui:domain\username switch. I believe that stands for User Include. I think that picks up only that user, so you could do this as an admin on their desktop without being logged in as that user.
If all you want is that user's account/folder you may also have to look at using a Config.xml file to include or exclude various file, folders and settings. This page on Technet contains a sample XML file that can be modified.
I can't remember exactly, but you can run:
and this will generate a configuration file for you. You can then view this file to see if what you need is going to be copied etc. Modify this file so that only the required settings and files will be moved and then use this file as an argument to ScanState:
In an ideal world, all that is left is to run LoadState on the new PC. Because you will only have backed up what you need, the Load should not need any fancy switches:
should be enough. That should create the user's profile on the new PC and when they next log in they should see their files on the desktop and so on.
In my experience though, I spent days trying to configure all sorts of fancy settings to migrate over to their new desktop half of which I could never get to work properly. And then it took an hour to backup a profile, 10 minutes to move onto a fileshare and another hour to load the new profile. And then it would fail somewhere for no reason.
In the end, we only had 100 PCs to replace over the course of 2 months so we just reset the users passwords and logged in as them to set up pristine new profiles.
Technet has massive amounts of info on this:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd560775%28WS.10%29.aspx
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd560801%28WS.10%29.aspx
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd560755%28WS.10%29.aspx
As you said it is a domain client, I am supposing that it is part of Active directory domain. This is quite possible programatically. You can connect to you ldap server and can do a lot of operations like creating users, changing passwords etc.
I'm going to assume that, in this case, you aren't doing centrally managed profiles, in other words, every user has their own local home directory on every machine they log into?
In that case, maybe it would save you some time to create a "skeleton" directory that you can insert for that user? A while back, I learned how to setup the default profile for my users (http://www.standalone-sysadmin.com/blog/2009/07/changing-the-windows-xp-default-user-profile/), so maybe the instructions in there could be modified for what you want?
I've never heard of this being possible. If you figure it out, I'd love to hear about it.
By far the easiest way to accomplish what you are trying to do, is to have an administrator reset the user's domain password. Then log on to the new desktop with that password, which creates the account. Then log off, reset the password again, and make sure somebody informs the user before they try to log in.
When a new profile is being created on a computer for a domain user, there's a lot that happens inside the registry as well as on the filesystem. Be mindful of that -- it's not sufficient to simply copy the user profile.
There is always option to tweak "Default User" profile for that purpose. If you copy stuff from desktop/ my documents to default user\desktop and default user\my documents it will be copied over when person will login for the first time. After that you have to however make sure to delete those files, otherwise each person login to that machine for the first time will get it. We used this technique for few years now while migrating users from pc to pc (in fact we copy whole profile, so that user feels like he haven't moved at all).