Before discussing how to configure roaming profiles, it is useful to see how Windows 9x/Me and Windows NT4/200x clients implement these features.

Windows 9x/Me clients send a NetUserGetInfo request to the server to get the user's profiles location. However, the response does not have room for a separate profiles location field, only the user's home share. This means that Windows 9x/Me profiles are restricted to being stored in the user's home directory.

Windows NT4/200x clients send a NetSAMLogon RPC request, which contains many fields including a separate field for the location of the user's profiles.