Though one would think the $field object is what we wanted-- the actual object we needed is $row (even though we're only looking at one field in the row).
Put the following into the field tpl file to see what the necessary info is:
<?phpprint '<pre>';print_r($row);print '</pre>';?>
Then, to actually make the link, put the following in your field tpl file:
<?php$account = user_load($row->uid);print l($row->profile_values_profile_fullname_value, 'users/' . $account->name);?>
Change 'profile_values_profile_fullname_value' to the proper field alias (based on the $row output). Also, be sure to change 'users' to whatever the path is for your user accounts.
I also had another thought-- given your use case, you may want to consider the http://drupal.org/project/realname module as well. It will replace usernames with whatever field(s) you designate all over the site.
EDIT: I had another thought. I'm not sure of the performance implications of doing a user_load in the template file. Another option is to add the 'User: name' field to the view but exclude it from display. Then you could avoid the user_load and change the code in the tpl file to:
<?phpprint l($row->profile_values_profile_fullname_value, 'users/' . $row->users_name);?>
Scott Blackburn on 10 Feb 09Litenode is a new module that uses Views to replace multiple node_loads() on a page. The concept is simple: Views already knows how to grab any of the fields in a single go that many modules load independently in their hook_nodeapi('load'). Why not have Views grab them all at once (as you would do in a table view, for example) and then have a style plugin map the Views fields to all the places where modules expect them to be on a loaded node?