Thanks for your comment. To be precise on the issue, you’re right, I didn’t explain what in the profile slows down the PC. I took it from a high-level standpoint. I should have clarified – I geared the post to the user (especially the home user) rather than a System Administrator, and since the user can’t do much regarding roaming profiles, I didn’t spend much time on the issue.

There are a few technical reasons why the PC slows down with a large profile. First, as you alluded, is obviously the login issue. The amount of time to log in will grow with the size of the profile, no matter if you are using a roaming profile or a local copy. However, as you said, a roaming profile will take even longer on login/logoff since the profile will have to be synchronized with the server rather than the local hard drive. Roaming profiles also present other delay issues, such as when logging into PCs that you don’t use often. Since there will be more to synchronize, the login process will take longer. Therefore, if you log into a lot of different PCs in your network and use roaming profiles, keeping the profile size down is certainly useful.

My original post considered the “slowness” of the PC once the user is already logged in, such as why configuration changes take so long and why certain operations either drag on (or in the case of registry corruption, throw weird errors). While keeping the amount of large files in your profile might be somewhat controllable, keeping your system registry from bloating is a lot more difficult, and this leads to many problems (including speed issues) in the long run.

“since we’re concentrating on profile size vs. computer performance, the disadvantages are the same.”

I don’t believe thats true. A roaming profile certainly has more of an issue with log on slow down because it has to download the profile from the server every time you log in.

I would be very curious as to why you believe a local profile size effects log on.