Remove old profiles from upgrade to 2010

Question

when i upgraded our environment from 2007 to 2010 it seems everyones profiles came with it. I did a cutover upgrade so i would have thought that any profiles in my 2007 environment would have been deleted. after the upgrade i noticed every ones infomation still existed like old descriptions that the user manually put in and links to there mysites. I have configured and reconfigured the profile sync service but it will not get rid of these profiles. Everynight a sync runs and AD changes are updated for the users so i know the service is working.

Its wierd because when i delete a users profile from the site collection and from central admin the users can still log in and all the data still shows. but if i look for the account it does not exist.

Can anyone explain what might be going on. I actually would like to completly wipe out all profiles and do fresh sync becuase we do not use mysites or allow manually editing anymore.

Answer 1

When a user logs in to a SharePoint site collection, a local profile is created in the site collection's User Information List. When a profile is deleted from your Active Directory (and your User Profile Service Application), the local profile in the User Information List remains.

If the record is removed from the User Information List in your target site collections, the list level audit data attached to any list items (Created By, Modified By, etc.) will be changed to reflect the System Account.