If you want to stop roaming profiles from downloading to a specific machines, eg. servers. Define a GPO for them with:
ConfigurationAdministrative TemplatesSystemUser profilesOnly allow local user profiles enabled.
I always have a hard time finding this particular setting among other… Now I know where to look 😉
I have set this setting both with a GPO and the local gpedit.msc approach. It simply does not work. My Terminal Services Roaming profile still gets used when I log onto that machine in terminal services Administration mode. The settings don’t change the behavior at all.
To my knowledge Roaming Profile and Terminal Services Profile are to different things. All accounts that I use do NOT have Terminal Services Profile path set, they all have only set User Profile path.
When I log-on (with my usual day-to-day account) to a server or a test machine where I do not need my Outlook inbox and other stuff, this GPO setting does the trick.