Roaming Profiles problems

[rsoxhater]

We have all our police department users setup as roaming profiles. Their desktop icons are completly disappearing - when they login all they see is the desktop, no icons, and have to use the start menu to get to everything. Up until a few months ago everything was working fine for the last two years or so.

All their computers are win2000, and the server that holds the profiles (also is our PDC) is windows 2000.

All the police computers are connected via cat5 wiring into the stack of switches in the police department, which is connected via multimode fiber optic cable to our main switch which are main servers are conncted into via cat6 gigabyte connections.

Before the fiber optic cable the two switches were conncted via a cat5 cable. We thought that might have been the problem as the length was probably approaching the limit of a single cat5 run.

Any ideas what could cause this problem with the profiles?

 

[RobBentley]

Check your have no spurious active desktop group policy settings on.

 

[Spudnick]

Also check the location that the profiles are located in. Are they still intact? has a drive letter changed or files been moved.

 

[rsoxhater]

The problem isn't with every user - for the most part they will work completely fine - its just randomly one user will lose his desktop icons. A few days later another one will lose it. Its never more than one at a time. That leads me away from policy or the drive letters. I would think it'd be the network dropping out, but the fiber optic connection should have taken care of that.

 

[Spudnick]

Are their other network issues? Maybe run a network diagnostic? Are the profiles set to roaming on the client systems. "Right click My Computer" and check under "profiles" and change the partuicular user to Roaming if not done so already.

 

[rsoxhater]

Network has been very solid as far as I have seen. Not one complaint from anyone other than this one specific issue.

I thought the Cat5e backbone we had between the police switches and our main switch might had been the problem, but we replaced that last week with the fiber and have had two different users desktop icons go since then.

What diagnostics would you recommend?

 

[cmycmy]

First add delete roamingcache=1 dans HKLM/Softw/Micr/WNT/CurVer/Winlogon afin d'éviter que le profile reste en local (to avoïd profile to stay local) This is a problem for roaming users when login in more than one machine same time or when roaming in Xtiple machines one after other (l'une après l'autre). You can set the same with GPO, that will be best.

Second, for those whose profile is out of order, you must:
Close their session
Save desktop
Delete profile on server
Delete all profiles on stations (if not set deleteroamingCache = 1)
Ask user to log on then to log off to create a new profile. Restore desktop in profile.
Permissions must be set Full control to system and user and must be inherit. (Eventually also to admin)
Finally user log on. He lost printers and ..... but not his desktop.
That will not run if local profiles stay on one machine your user log on again. It's the real difficulty.
We experience same problem and have about one year to be clean whith 100 users and 80 PC.
Good luck.