Windows 7 Redirected Start Menu intermittent

Hi all;

Just slowly working our way through a few bugs after our complete upgrade to Windows 7 over summer.

One particularly random issue we have (and confirmed mostly to one ICT room) is that random students will have a problem whereby their START menu shows the folders for the different deprtments (ie IT, ART etc) but no program shortcuts within. They still get thier home drives mapped ok so not, at a guess, the machine not connecting to the network at login...but then again..

It's basically a GPO that redirects the start menu to \\server\studentstartmenu$

I have tried the following and will await test results:

Disabled the Offline files on server side for studentstartmenu$ share
In that room I have turned off 'allow the computer to turn off the device to save power' on the NICs
Turn off TCP/IP offload on the Nics

However, I have known these PCs in these ICT rooms historically had issues with NICs whereby if they (NICs)were ran at 1Gb machines will randomly drop off the network requiring a reboot even with XP (I have now upgraded the whole school with Netgear GS724TS) - I have found Windows 7 less tolerant to network hardware issues and will drop drives etc vs XP, as an observation...

Anyone else have any suggestions? Could it be Network issues? It would be rather embrassing though since I spent the summer replacing the Core and all the edge switches.

PS Most of the issues I'm having are with that type of PCs (built by unknown brand a few years back...we have Dells and Novatechs in other ICT rooms running Win7 with few if any issues at all)

Thanks as always

Ps students are using Local Profiles at the moment, until I get mandatory profiles working properly

I would recommend removing offline files completely if i was you as we have so many issues from it.

Sounds like your issue is network or permission related. Can you confirm that permissions are correct on the start menu share and they have propagated to child? Try a free trial of PRTG running of a computer and then set a ping to some random computers. You can then see a log from throughout the day and see if there are any network drop outs

Are all the NIC drivers fully up to date? And i assume you have the "Always Wait for the network at computer startup and logon" GPO enabled?

Otherwise i'd try and isolate the problem as such. Is it only affecting certain PCs in the room?

Also check the event logs and see if anything shows up in there

Quote:

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Originally Posted by deano

I would recommend removing offline files completely if i was you as we have so many issues from it.

Sounds like your issue is network or permission related. Can you confirm that permissions are correct on the start menu share and they have propagated to child? Try a free trial of PRTG running of a computer and then set a ping to some random computers. You can then see a log from throughout the day and see if there are any network drop outs

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Thanks Deano, Have removed offline files on the Student startmenu share, and sahre permissions are 'Everyone' = Full control, then NTFS = Read/Execute on Students

Quote:

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Originally Posted by ICTTechie

Are all the NIC drivers fully up to date? And i assume you have the "Always Wait for the network at computer startup and logon" GPO enabled?

Otherwise i'd try and isolate the problem as such. Is it only affecting certain PCs in the room?

Also check the event logs and see if anything shows up in there

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Thank you.

NICs are fully up to date, The GPO (Always Wait for network... was historically set on Defualt Domain Policy Win 2003 R2 domain(before I joined) so I have now created a sub OU in that room with the "Always wait for Network.." in that problematic room to check PS we are now a Windows 2008 R2 Domain

PCs effected are random in that room, upon further questioning, I have the following data:

ICT Room 1 = always have the blank start menu everyday on random PCs (Old AMD Quad core, no brand, SSD drive 1Gb NIC)
ICT Room 2 = Very rare (ie reported once of no start menu in a month for a student) (Old AMD Quad core, no brand, SSD drive 1Gb NIC)
ICT Room 3 = Sometimes have blank start menus and no internet (once every two weeks) (Old Gateway machines 1Gb NIC)
ICT Room 4,5,6 = No problems at all (Novatech i3 1GB NIC)

Wierdly looking at the event viewers on random machines in ALL ICT rooms have this:

Windows failed to apply the Folder Redirection settings. Folder Redirection settings might have its own log file. Please click on the "More information" link.

The Group Policy settings for the user were processed successfully. New settings from 4 Group Policy objects were detected and applied.

Some of these roomss (ie on Novatech machines) have the above error but no users have complained about start menus or my documents

Some of the problematic rooms have the following:

Event Type: Error
Event Source: NETLOGON
Event Category: None
Event ID: 5719
Date: Date
Time: Time
User: N/A
Computer: ICTPC-01
Description:
No Domain Controller is available for domain <domain name> due to the following: There are currently no logon servers available to service the logon request. Make sure that the computer is connected to the network and try again. If the problem persists, please contact your domain administrator.

There are also various DNS server not avalaible errors that I will detail tomorrow when I get the chance to jump on a problem machine.

I have Windows 2008 R2 DC running DHCP, A student fileserver (where start menu share is redirected - a HP DL380 G7 with Quad teamed NIC)

Running through Netgear GSM7328S / FS stack (Layer 3, although I'm not using relay or any features at the moment, the main network servers/PC runs on VLAN1 at the moment) some of the servers (The DC ) is plugged onto the old DLINK core layer 2 switch at the moment which I'm hoping to move to the core stack soon..bit of a head scratcher I'm afraid.

Also what worries me is that even though GPO policy disables offline files I have found Offline files is enabled on the Win 7 PCs and the Disable button is greyed out even logged on as Administrator, so dunno whether that's helping things either.

Thanks as always

Ps students re running on local profiles, server has DFS feature activated(replication not namespace)

If your'e running SP1 on Windows 7 there are a number of hotfixes for folder redirections. We have SP1 on a bank of laptops which initially threw up issues with blank Start up menus, these issues seemed to dissappear after a while, I can't rule out network connectivity issues however as there were existing issues with XP with these certain laptops. Hopefully Windows 7 SP2 will fix these issues without creating different complicated issues.

Windows 7 seems to do what it feels like with offline files. It may be best to disable offline files on the share, however this may effect your'e users that take domain laptops home and you will need to provide a way of giving them access to the start menu if they only use redirected start menu such as ours. This could be done by a desktop folder pointing to a location on the hard drive which could be synced by a script at logon if neccessary.

Thanks

On picking a random machine in the problematic room (ICT Room 14 is the real name, I have looked through the event viewer and spotted the following:

Log Name: Application
Source: Microsoft-Windows-Folder Redirection
Date: 14/09/2012 10:52:30
Event ID: 502
Task Category: None
Level: Error
Keywords:
User: School\William.Smith Computer: ICT14-PC02.school.sch
Description:
Failed to apply policy and redirect folder "Programs" to "\\srv-fs02\StudentStartMenu$\Programs".
Redirection options=0x9020.
The following error occurred: "Can not create folder "\\srv-fs02\StudentStartMenu$\Programs"".
Error details: "Access is denied.

is this a red herring? in srv-fs02 I have only the subject folders created and not the struture the GPO is trying to apply above (that is with the \Programs bit)

Also getting these:

Log Name: System
Source: Microsoft-Windows-DNS-Client
Date: 05/10/2012 11:59:12
Event ID: 1014
Task Category: None
Level: Warning
Keywords:
User: NETWORK SERVICE
Computer: ICT14-PC02.school.sch
Description:
Name resolution for the name ICT14-PC02.school.sch timed out after none of the configured DNS servers responded.


Log Name: System
Source: Microsoft-Windows-GroupPolicy
Date: 05/09/2012 08:53:32
Event ID: 1055
Task Category: None
Level: Error
Keywords:
User: SYSTEM
Computer: ICT14-PC02.school.sch
Description:
The processing of Group Policy failed. Windows could not resolve the computer name. This could be caused by one of more of the following:
a) Name Resolution failure on the current domain controller.
b) Active Directory Replication Latency (an account created on another domain controller has not replicated to the current domain controller).

Log Name: System
Source: NetBT
Date: 05/10/2012 11:35:16
Event ID: 4321
Task Category: None
Level: Error
Keywords: Classic
User: N/A
Computer: ICT14-PC02.school.sch
Description:
The name "SCHOOL :1d" could not be registered on the interface with IP address 10.18.96.198. The computer with the IP address 10.18.99.99 did not allow the name to be claimed by this computer.

(PS the IP addressof 10.18.99.99 was our old demoted Win 2003 DC ?)

Log Name: System
Source: NETLOGON
Date: 05/10/2012 11:58:52
Event ID: 5719
Task Category: None
Level: Error
Keywords: Classic
User: N/A
Computer: ICT14-PC02.school.sch
Description:
This computer was not able to set up a secure session with a domain controller in domain SCHOOL due to the following:
There are currently no logon servers available to service the logon request.
This may lead to authentication problems. Make sure that this computer is connected to the network. If the problem persists, please contact your domain administrator.

ADDITIONAL INFO
If this computer is a domain controller for the specified domain, it sets up the secure session to the primary domain controller emulator in the specified domain. Otherwise, this computer sets up the secure session to any domain controller in the specified domain.

So tomorrow (and quite understanble, my SMT is getting anxious) I will try the following fixes:

Event ID 5719 and event ID 1129 may be logged when a non-Microsoft DHCP Relay Agent is used
Windows 7 Clients intermittently fail to apply group policy at startup

Then I will change the Netgear GS724TS edge stack to see if it makes any difference (I have already disabled spanning tree to test to see if it makes a difference - it hasn't) although would I need to disable it at the Core switch too?

My SMT wants me to replace his room with 30 new PCs, I really want to make sure that's not needed and could trace this problem to the switch or cabling somewhere.

Aarrgghhh!

It turned out I did not turn off Spanning Tree afterall, schoolboy error and forgot to 'apply' with Spanning tree off seems to have eliminated the problem(on the Edge Switches) will keep an eye though.