One of the items I attempted to perform in my early morning troubleshooting was to even recreate the user account for the user and reconnect it to the mailbox. This, of course, had no effect on the problem at all. It did, however, create the one problem I forgot about–it munged his local profile on his laptop. I forgot that when one creates a new account in Active Directory, a new SID is created. Obviously, the SID is tracked within the registry to track who has access to the local profile. When my user logged in this morning, he had a new profile created in %SystemDrive%\Documents and Settings\ of the form username.domainname. This was no good to me, since we had everything else we needed for the user in their local profile.

After lunch, I had to do some quick research on the subject as none of my earlier attempts to swap profiles did not work. Thanks to
Drew Mclellan at “Recovering a Windows Profile.” One caveat to this fix is that your user account will have to have NTFS rights to the old profile directory, and the user will probably need to have local administrator rights to the workstation. The short way to fix this is to:

1. Make sure to login to the local machine as an administrator or equivalent.
2. Click Start|Run, then type regedit in the Open field.
3. Navigate to HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList. You should see a series of keys on the left that will look like S-1-234567890. These are SIDs, and they correspond to the actual users logging into your system.
4. Hit CTRL+F to bring up the Find dialog box. In the Find what: field, enter %SystemDrive%\Documents and Settings\oldusername.domainname. Essentially, you should find this entry once. The SID this was associated with was your old user account.
5. Edit the value of this key such that it has the name of your old profile directory. In other words, make the value %SystemDrive%\Documents and Settings\oldusername.
6. Reboot your machine, and now login as the user again–making sure to log into the domain. Your new settings should be restored as they were before.

I am still watching MSPSS work their magic, but I don’t think my tech quite understands my issue. It looks like I might be here for a while watching him remote control my workstation. At least their per incident support charge is cheaper than Novell’s ever was.

UPDATE: As I was thinking, the mailbox will need to be deleted and recreated, then reconnected with the user. Looks like ExMerge is going to play a role in this process. Wonder how ExMerge handles over 2GB of mail?  The problem in this case was that someone–presumably a consultant that preceded me–gave Full Mailbox Access rights to the group Mail Operators.  Mail Operators includes all of my users–something I need to fix.  As a result, in the case of this mailbox, they had full access to our partner’s mail folders.  Once this was removed, access to his folders behaves as it should.

• Whoever called this place Hotlanta is sadly mistaken.  In my second day here, it has actually gotten colder.  WTF?!?!?!  If I wanted New England weather, I would have traveled north to Boston.  It is pretty windy and cold here today.
• Watching yesterday’s games were awesome.  LSU upsetting Duke was awesome.  The photo to the right was just one scene of many to enjoy.  My voice was a little sore following my cheering against the hated Dookies, and for a brief moment, I was actually cheering on the LSU Tigers.  I will not, nor will I ever, cheer Geux Tigers (I have to agree with the two a-holes).  Even better was the Kentucky fan who had her photo taken with our “Duke SUCKS!” banner (bigger story on that later). 
• The end of the second game was exciting, too.  Nothing like a last minute “3″ to seal the win for Texas.

Time to enjoy the rest of the day and more drunkenness.

I am keeping my fingers crossed, but here’s hoping I get off the ground this evening.

How did I follow-up such a good dinner? I went out and played trivia with some friends. We played as J’s Harem–the team consisted of me and five lovely ladies. We won the game and enjoyed some beers to boot. Kneel before me and worship my trivia mastery!