Windows Mandatory Profile and PrivatePreferences.json Edits

Technical Problems SketchUp
1

Hello and first time user on the community.

I have an interesting issue that I’ve not found a solution for nor any occurrence on the site for that matter, so I thought to post the issue it here.

I have a computer running Windows 10 and SketchUp Pro 2019 in a Windows 2012r2 enterprise network environment and experiencing an issue when making changes to the PrivatePreferences.json file.

We use windows global policies to manage and lock down our user roaming profiles. If you are unfamiliar with mandatory roaming profiles; we change the user.DAT file name to user.MAN in the users profile roaming location. This prevents any changes to the profile state and protects the user profile.

I should also say that this is a public environment and the PC is used by a multitude of users so we lockdown and limit access to drive C. This is why I need to change some of the file paths.

Through some research I’ve come to find that Sketchup file locations are stored in one of two files.

C:Users\”user name”\AppData\Local\SketchUp\SketchUp 2019\SketchUp\PrivatePreferences.json

C:\Users\”user name”\AppData\Roaming\SketchUp\SketchUp 2019\SketchUp\SharedPreferences.json

It appears the file locations are stored in the local PrivatePreferences.json file, which makes sense.

So the problem is, when changes are made to the settings namely the file locations such as “Images”: “U:\Sketchup\”, they are only sticking when the user profile file extension is .DAT. When I change it to .MAN and run the application for the first time them making the changes, they stick. Until I run the application a second time which seems to overwrite my changes and sets the file paths back to defaults. I’ve even gone as far as setting the file to read only and still it is overwritten.

I suspect that Sketchup is detecting that a mandatory profile is being used and doing something behind the scenes to resetting the defaults.

Any help would greatly be appreciated.

2

Have you read the EULA?

You need to find another way…

3

I don’ think this situation is what the chapter in the EULA is referring to. I understand what is meant is circumventing license restrictions by, for instance, setting up multiple simultaneous users on a computer with a single license (just theorizing, don’t know if that is even possible).
I don’t know what the phrase “virtual server environment” is referring to. No large business that I know of has their data stored on a battery of physical computers locked away in their cellar, but they use service providers that create just that - virtual servers that can be easily managed and moved around without being tied permanently to a single physical piece of hardware.

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Ok this is weird, I’m not sure if anyone else is seeing the two responses to my post, but I think they belong to the following post and have nothing to do with my situation.

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