Strange logon issue

[richard_s]

Got a bit of a strange problem at one of the schools that we have done some work for recently. When people logon to the network sometimes for sometimes they do not connect to their network drives. This problem appears to be completely random and has got me bit stumped so if anyone has any ideas I would to hear them.

[elsiegee40]

Sounds like profile corruption to me.

Are these people using mandatory or roaming profiles?

In either case, a clear out of profiles stored on the local machines is needed. Investigate delprof.exe which is well documented on these boards.

For the roaming profile users, it may be necessary to delete the server copy of their profiles too so that a new profile is created. I usually rename the server profile to old and let the new profile be created. Once the user has logged off, I then copy their favourites into their new profiles... remove the local copy of the profile again and they are back in business.

When this happens here, it is usually, but not always, related to people who log onto more than one machine at a time.

The thing people usually notice first, when their profile has become corrupted, here is that their task bar is grey and not blue...

[richard_s]

They don't use roaming profiles as they don't believe in them and from what I have seen they do not use mandatory profiles either. I will suggest to their IT manager that they look at cleaning out the local profiles on the machines to see if that helps.

[elsiegee40]

OOh heck! Been very busy and only just back to this one!

Be very careful ... make sure there's nothing in the local profile that you need to save.

[richard_s]

I will pass this on to the IT manager as we only provided the server hardware and the logon script and had nothing to do with the setup of the system.

[jc1875]

We have that on occaision.
we just run a group policy forced update

gpupdate /force

and get them to log out and in again.

[Stuart_C]

I've found windows explorer occasionally fails to show network drives yet they are there if you open a program (e.g. Word) and goto file ==> open

@elsiegee40 - If you run a network with local profiles there really should be nothing in the local profile that needs saving (with the possible exception of outlook data files depending on your opinions) IMO. If your users don't realise this, train them!

[dwhyte85]

Are you certain it's the same case for all people or people within a specific OU?

I made a boo-boo recently where i set a gpo within an OU which was already getting settings from the parent OU and they both seemedcancelled each other out, consequently a whole year group didn't get a H drive for 20 minutes until i'd worked out what I had done. Everyother set of users were fine! As soon as removed the child OUs GPO it worked fine :'(