I have a user that was using Windows XP until yesterday. The computer ended up getting a virus (again) and so I replaced it with a spare Windows 7 machine we were preparing for somewhere else. The Windows 7 machine is freshly installed and fully updated. When the user signs in with their domain profile the Windows 7 machine just loads a temporary profile each time. Restarting and logging off and back on does not fix it. Also there's no registry key or folder created for the user.
I doubt this makes a difference, but I have Offline Files disabled. Oh, and the server hosting Active Directory is a Windows Server 2003 R2 x64.
Does anyone have any suggestions on how I can get the machine to load the user's profile?
Vista / 2008 introduced a different profile, so you wouldn't be looking at issues with the original profile as the Win 7 client will create a new profile and put that to the server (appending .V2 to the path).
In my experience, the Event Viewer has told me everything I need to know about profile-related issues (or at least given me enough to Google the issue). The problem is that the number of potential causes is vast, but most likely related to permissions. Today, for me, it was a full disk on the client OS.
With the detail you have provided, all that can be suggested is to check the event viewer for "User Profile Service" related events and see what the OS is complaining about.
You might try as a troubleshooting step to rename the Terminal Services (Remote Desktop {if newer version of AD}) path to something slightly different like changing it from userbobsmith to userbobsmithA, and creating a new empty profile folder I often do this, and it confirms for me that there's no server issue or permissions issue with the user, also if the user is able to successfully login using the new folder, the most common cause I see with the similar scenario is ridiculously long file names in a temp folder, like appdata.
Well, in the end the issue was resolved with a new profile. The employee in question recently got married so she asked me to change her last name. I just made a new profile and everything worked like magic.