Re: Roaming profiles - and disappearing desktop icons

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Rene Brehmer <rene@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Thu, 15 May 2008 17:24:12 -0400, Lanwench [MVP - Exchange] wrote:

Problem: All of a sudden, no warning, all desktop icons will
disappear, except for those in the local All Users profile.
Everything still works, wallpaper is retained, all network drives
and folders are still fully accessible.
While investigating the issue on the one machine, I all of a sudden
had a bubble pop up in the system tray saying connection to the
server was lost, and in the same instant the icons disappeared. A
few seconds later it said connection had been re-established, but
the icons didn't come back. So far, only way to restore the icons
have been for people to restart the computer.

I get no error messages in neither the local event log, or on the
server. Or any other message to indicate a problem. I checked
rsop.msc and all folder redirections are set properly. My Documents
have 2 redirections, one being from the SBSuser default profile, and
the other from the specific roaming user GPO I made...

Not sure how many months it's been since I put in the roaming
profiles, but the user count is the same, nothing's been changed in
the system... yet it still happens. It happens on machines that have
AVG firewall installed, and the ones where it's not installed, so it
can't be an issue with that.

I'd start by disabling offline files - but see the following - (esp.
re folder redirection - do it for My Documents, Desktop, and
Application Data)

If you follow all of these steps your roaming profiles should work.
I have all my clients' networks setup with them and it's extremely
rare that I have problems.

Hi Lanwench,

I followed your cookbook to the letter before, disabled the offline
files and everything. And the profiles work great.

Ah. Cool beans. I thought your name looked familiar

The only issue is that, for some reason, some of the machines will
randomly lose the connection to the server in the midst of work, and
all the desktop icons goes awol when that happens. Logout or restart
of the machine, and the icons are back.

The problem is the connection being lost, clearly!

I can't for the life of me figure out what causes the machine to lose
the connection in the first place, let alone why that causes the
icons to disappear.

Redirecting the desktop.....

I get that the desktop is on the server, and
that's a problem if the connection is lost, but the why the hell do
the icons disappear mid-session because the connection is lost for 2
seconds??

It makes perfect sense to me. The connection dropped. :-)

And since they go away in this case, why don't they come
back when the connection is restored? All the problems I have in
regards to the roaming profiles have to do with the desktop... none
of the other redirected folders experience any problems...

I'd expect application data to have the same problems, honestly.The fact
that you've got a flaky network connection is the first thing I'd look at.
Your Ethernet switch may not be up to par, or your cabling, or your NIC
drivers, or your NIC speed/duplex settings - if those aren't in great shape,
you should expect trouble of some sort. What else? Is your server very busy?

Other than that, people can log into any machine, have all their
settings, icons, wallpaper and all that, so I know the profiles work
like they should. I haven't had to do anything for any of our new
employees lately other than set them up on the server.

Well, you still need to tweak the profiles to set up printers & Outlook,
right?


.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Roaming profiles - and disappearing desktop icons
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