Random Folder Redirection Problems

[ken_kaniff]

We have a Windows 2003 network of around 800 users and about 300 win2k and xp pro workstations. pupils and teachers are locked down by group policies which works great except every now and then, randomly the folder redirection for the start menu wil fail and they'll get a stubby little start menu with next to nothing on.

They have no access to anything else, no desktop, no my computer etc, this is by design, but it means they then cant do anything but log off and comlain... and complain... and.... complain.

nothing in the event logs indicates what the problem is. nothing aparently is failing as far as windows in concerned. it's getting worse though!

help?

[ChrisH]

I get that sometimes and its usually a network problem.

[ken_kaniff]

i coming to a similar conclusion. the start menu folder is on one of the DCs, and i'm guessing that maybe when a full class of 30 kids log on simultaneously some of the redirects time out. if this was the case though i'd expect some sort of an error in the eventlog though... has anyone ever played with copying start menu folders locally using a simple startup script then setting group policy to redirect to this local folder?

sounds too easy to me... but in theory wouldn't this work? would cut down on network traffic a bit too. Our start menus can be very laggy at times.

[ChrisH]

That is what I was going to do as I have mentioned in another post. I was going to redirect to a local folder and have the login script check the version which I was going to read from a textfile name. If it needed updating it would copy over.
I know its our intercabinet links that are at fault sometimes as these problems dont occur in the 2 suites that are connected to the same stack as the servers. Our links are copper at a supposed 1 gig but I doubt it Going to try and get some fiber in next financial year.

[mark]

Same hardware/ problem here Chris. I find myself repeating the instruction to open thier documents folders and opening an old file of the type they want to create - either from there or from the share...

[ken_kaniff]

thats all well and good if your users have sufficent permissions to navigate to their documents without the start menu! :-)

i've now got my whole setup copying the start menu across locally on startup (simply using xcopy) and redirecting the users start menu based on that.. we have one start menu for teachers and another for kids. so we'll see how that goes. a helpful side-effect of doing things this way is that adding shortcuts to the start menu's of individual workstations (such as scanner software etc) is now childsplay too.

i'm hoping this will be the final workaround...

[Alex]

not a classlink network is it?

[Ric_]

the first thing that i would chec is that here areno errors in GPMC - more useful than eventlog

have you tried hosting the files on a different server?

[ken_kaniff]

alex: christ no!

Ric_: i toyed with the idea and then i thought about copying them locally and went with that instead. to be honest i think just using our fileserver to host the start menu would have solved the problem equally well... but i'm being presumptous, only time will tell if it's acyually fixed.

touch wood(en leg) it is