After cleaning yet another Windows 2003 Terminal server for Excessive Registry Entries in the users HKCU caused by the HP universal Printer Driver, we noticed that the ntuser.dat file in there roaming profile still was very large up to 20 MB.
The reason for this is that even though we deleted all the registry entries which we didn’t need, this just gave a lot of blank spaces in the ntuser.dat file, so we needed a way to compress the file.
One tool I personally didn’t knew about is the Windows 2003 tool called cProfile, with cProfile we were able to compress all users ntuser.dat files in there roaming profiles so that many of them jumped from 20 MB to less than 1 MB.
cProfile information can be found here cProfile
