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I noticed that with Roaming Profiles enabled that even applications have been roaming. Is this normal? Is there a way to keep applications from roaming? I like how Firefox bookmarks move from machine to machine(does cache move as well???) as it is a great way to remain in-sync but I do not like how every application is moved.

I always thought that Roaming Profiles kept just the USERDIR in motion.

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By "applications have been roaming" I think you're saying that EXEs stored in the portion of the user's profile that is "Roaming" are being copied to the server and back down to client computers when the user logs-on. (Hopefully I'm understanding what you're saying. If not, please let me know and I'll edit accordingly.)

This is normal behavior. Roaming user profiles aren't much more than a convoluted and glorified file copying mechanism. If EXEs end up in the roaming portion of a user's profile then they'll be copied.

You can use Group Policy to exclude folders from roaming. (That article references Windows Server 2003 but those particular settings work on all current versions of Windows.)

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  • Cache and temporary directories are typically not roamed since they reside in the %LOCALAPPDATA% part of the profile, which is excluded from roaming by default. Applications which save settings in %APPDATA% or in the registry will receive these settings with the roaming profile everywhere the user logs on. The very idea of roaming profiles is to enable the user to log on on any domain machine and present roughly the same environment.
    – the-wabbit
    Jul 10, 2014 at 15:15
  • What I noticed was some how utorrent was copied over and ended up in the start menu and I never installed it on that machine. This is a default GPO setup.
    – Jason
    Jul 10, 2014 at 16:57

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