Jelle Druyts

Tricky: I wanted to be able to login to my freshly-installed laptop using my company domain user, but I wasn't in the office so I didn't have physical access to the network. Since you can't login using a domain user if you're not actually connected to the domain the first time you do that, that's bit of a problem. If you got in once then you're settled because windows caches your credentials, but I really didn't feel like driving out there just to log in and back out again. Of course, there's a VPN I can connect to and that does part of the trick (I can get on the company LAN with my domain user) but it doesn't create a profile on my machine so that's no good: I still can't login to windows using my domain account since at login-time there's no VPN connection available.

So here's the trick: log in with a local account (say, Administrator), connect to the company domain over the VPN, enable Remote Desktop for your domain user (which it must and can validate since you're connected to the VPN), now start a Remote Desktop Connection to the local machine using the domain user. It will log you in through the VPN and create your profile. Log out of Remote Desktop, log out of your local account, log in with your domain account. Done. Without moving an inch