Profile Storage Space Issues

Both Martin and I are experiencing blow-outs of our profile space (currently around 120MB), mainly due to Visual Studio 2008.  We can handle it with the handy little Registry snippet which grants us unlimited space.  However, logging in and out on the network is taking longer each time.

I wonder if now is a good time to think about and/or investigate the option of running Virtual Machines and moving Visual Studio onto there.  I personally don’t have the time to look into this.  What are other people’s opinions?

• Norman replied:
  • My profile is sitting on 45Mb and I am running VS2008 (VS2005 and VS2003 as well).  I am wondering if it is SP1 for VS2008 that is storing a lot more in the d:\Documents and Settings...? 
  • I am a bit wary of the extra complexity of using VMs and think a better option maybe some further tweaks so that VS2008 stores its settings in a different location than d:\Documents and Settings\... .  I think most of it is set in the Registry as the options below only cover a small subset of where it stores its stuff
  • Totally agree we need to do something.  Recently I had to test Brochure Template on an EDS Machine in Auckland logging in using my T number.  As you can imagine very slow and could not log out (no rights to tweak the Registry).
• Martin replied:
  • Where is the official source to state the current size of your profile?  I was looking at System properties.. Advanced.. User Profiles.. and my roaming profile was 585MB!  Is this the same profile EDS tracks?  I've culled mine back to 100MB now..
  • I've cut that back dramatically by deleting the ReflectedSchemas and ReflectedTypeLibs that VS likes to generate all the time.
  • But it is only a temporary fix, though I plan to write a script to run when I want to log off or shut down that will automatically delete them every time.
  • Those project and template locations tend to not have much in them unless you are creating your own user templates.
  • The best solution would be to exclude certain folders from our profile.  The only thing stopping that from happening is getting EDS to set it up for us?
• James replied:
  • I am reluctant to adopt Martin’s idea, as I believe those Reflected Schemas are what IntelliSense generate each time you invoke them, so I don’t want to constantly have to be waiting for IntelliSense every day. 
  • Does anybody in the community have any (useful) suggestions?
• Mike (manager) replied:
  • Move those files out of profile space onto hard drive;
  • Create shortcuts in the profile space to the actual files.
• Conclusion:
  • I did move those files out;
  • But shortcuts didn't work;
  • But in the ReflectedSchemas folder is a file "entries.xml" (same for ReflectedTypes folder);
  • if you edit this to point to the new location of the real files, then Visual Studio will happily use them;
  • New .xsd files will still be created in your profile as you develop, but a periodic sweep (manually) should fix that.