IE8 Settings driving me nuts

[plexer]

I rolled out IE8 to all our machines last week and now applying the proxy settings is intermittent.

My domain has gone from 2000 - 2003 - 2008 R2 since it was first setup around 8 years ago so I'm seriously tempted to blow all my gpo's away and start again.

Ben

[ihaveaproblem]

I'm creating new because upgradeded to 2008r2 from 2003. The policys that were made on 2003 work but seem a bit unreliable so if you have the time it might be worth doing

[plexer]

I think I've narrowed down the issue.

My student mandatory profile was created circa 6 years ago as well and it seems to be this that's causing the issue.

If I redirect a test student users profile to a folder in their my docs it gets created upon next login and IE8 proxy settings appear to apply successfully, however the profile folder now in their my docs remains emtpy and I would expect it to get populated with a ntuser.dat

More testing me thinks.

Ben

[plexer]

That was caused by permissions.

I've now given all students roaming profiles and Ie8 settings are applying as expected.

Ben

[plexer]

Seems I was celebrating too soon, this is just completely baffling.

The 2 things that have changed since last year are installing 2008 R2 on a server previously running 2003 R2 and deploying IE8 to all desktops.

Gpresult on both an xp and 7 machine shows that the gpo holding the internet settings for students has been applied, except that it hasn't and IE doesn't pick up any proxy settings, I've just tried by adding in the url for the pac file on our smoothwall box log on to an xp machine and not pac file shown run gpupdate and the pac file is set and applied.

I've disabled slow link at both the computer and user level in GPO.

I thought that perhaps it was the 2nd server with some corrupt GPO's or something but checking the %logonserver% variable shows the issue occurs no matter which server processed the logon.

This has been going on since the start of term and understandably people want blood.

Any thoughts?

Ben

[TheMan100]

Strange... You could apply the proxy settings by using GPP to create registry values, and just set the proxy settings by using the registry.

[plexer]

Thing is this wasn't a problem before the summer, one of our domain controllers has been 2008 R2 since last year so the only difference this year is upgrading the other one and deploying IE8 settings apply randomly even on a win 7 machine I built today.

Ben

[PiqueABoo]

GPP has a specific Internet Explorer settings feature that works fine. The only problem with it is that MS don't update it for new releases of IE e.g. 2008 server GPP does IE7 + earlier, 2008 R2 does IE8 + earlier (but not IE9).

[You can fiddle the underlying XML but that's a pain]

Reasons for IE8 not working when *you haven't changed anything else*: Some old IE settings have been known to confuse later IE e.g. you don't have a proxy for gopher set do you?

[plexer]

I took the gopher settings out after readung that it messed things up for IE7.

I've been through all my policies can't see anything to conflict.

Ben

[plexer]

It appears it may have been due to offline caching on the profile share won't know for sure until monday.

Ben

[marsdenprimary]

Did you get this sorted? We've just had server 2008 r2 installed on a new server and suddenly the computers are losing the proxy settings. The 'settings' are there but the box is greyed out in the connection settings... this of course is driving staff crazy and i need a solution asap if poss!!