At 20,000ft, you really want to use this type of clone as a death-and-rebirth to clean out all the crap and establish a clean new baseline.
I must admit that if I were you I would go out and buy a USB HDD and use that when in a desktop / development mode. Lots of cheap storage for temporary VDIs etc.
In terms of Windows, the logical registry is actually made up of a number of hive files, some in Windows and two per user (typically called ntuser.dat and UsrClass.dat in the user's Documents and Settings directory hierarchy (let's abbreviate this to DnS for ease of this post). These last two are specific to the user context and their location is read when the user is authenticated (AFAIR in LSASS.exe) from the HKLM\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\hivelist. The "proper" way to relocate DnS is to udpate the Unattend.txt file by reauthoring your media, but I've found that a variant of the KB236621 Article is the easiest way.
For a new user you must do the following from an administrator account:
- Run regedit and go to HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList
- Use Control Panel->User Accounts to create your new user (let's say newUser). Specify a password.
- Now Notepad runAs newUser. (This a right click option). Close notepad.
- If you now go back to regedit and refresh (F5). You will see a new entry for newUser. It's actually keyed by the SID of the new user, but it's easy to recognise as the one with newUser in the ProfileImagePath field. Now edit this and change %SystemDrive% to D:. Close regedit.
- Now in explorer move C:\DnS\newUser to D:\DnS\newUser.
- Now explore the Windows directory, find regedit and runAs newUser. You are now seeing the registry as newUser. Search for \DnS\newUser and make sure these refer to D:\DnS\newUser. (There should only be a dozen or so if you've never logged on interactively. Close regedit.
- If you don't want a password on the account go back into User Accounts and click on Remove the password.
- You can now log on as newUser and your account is homed on the D drive.
If you google something like XP hivelist ProfileList move account then no doubt you will find better explanations, not that this has anything to do with VBox
Contributing to this sort of forum is easy. All you need to do is to spend 30 years in the industry then get ill and suddenly discover that you can't walk for more than 50 yds without falling over and being knocked out for a week (CFS). When you're stuck in bed 22x7, it's amazing what you find interesting (as long as your brain works). Things like this forum keep me sane.