The World According to Mitch

“How do I delete old users from a Windows 10 computer? I log in as an administrator, navigate to c:\Users\, and delete their tree.”

NO!  In fact, HELL NO!

There are several reasons why you might want to delete a user profile from a computer. ranging from termination of employment to reallocation of systems to… well, you get the picture.  There are a few of ways you can do it, but there are only a couple of ways of doing it right,

Recently I was working with a client who encountered a situation where a few of his domain users’ local profiles were corrupted on a corporate system.  I told him that the simplest way of fixing the issue was to delete the user profile, so that when the user next logged on, it would re-create the profile for them.  They called me back a few minutes later reporting that they were now receiving the following message when the affected users logged in:

Okay, that led me to believe they had simply deleted the c:\Users\%username% directory, and we had to clean up that mess in the registry (under “KEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList”, delete any entries that have the .BAK extension).

Okay… now that we have learned how NOT to do it, here’s how you should do it:

1) Open Control Panel > System and Security > System in the affected machine.  The simplest way to do this in the more recent releases of Windows 10 is to click Run – sysdm.cpl.

3) In the Advanced tab of the System Properties window, in the User Profiles section, click Settings…

4) In the User Profiles window, click on the user you want to delete, and click Delete.

**NOTE: You will not be able to delete the account you are logged in as, nor the default Administrator account.

Of course, you will be asked if you are really really sure that you want to delete the account, and you can click Yes or No as you wish.

There are ways to do it in PowerShell… but they don’t seem to be very clear or very easy.  For this one time, I strongly suggest the GUI.