Group Policy loopback affecting folder redirection

[rocknrollstar]

Hi, firstly to say a big thank you to everyone on this site- as a full time teacher in primary (and someone who looks after the network), I really value the support and information provided by everyone. Thanks! Virtual beer all round.

Also a question:

I have 3 PCs that are used as backup machines (attached USB drive). I wanted to disable the 'shutdown' option, so used the "Computer Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> System -> Group Policy -> User Group Policy loopback processing mode" option. (see this thread for more info: Disable shutdown and loopback GPO issue).

Anyway, it works fine, and shutdown isn't available as planned. However, on these machines now, when any user logs in, there is no folder redirection for my documents. All the other desktops and laptops for which loopback is not applied work absolutely fine. The users are mandatory.

When using the loopback feature, is there any side affect for folder redirection? Interestingly, the desktop and start menu are redirected ok, just the My Docs are not.I can see that the my documents are always located in "C:\documents and settings\username\My Documents", but not on the network as the students profile dictates.

Any thoughts much appreciated. Thank you.

[User3204]

Yes, it'll do that. That's what the Loopback means, it uses the User settings you've made to apply to the computers, instead of using the normal Group Policy that you use for users.

One of the options when applying loopback is "merge" as opposed to "replace" the GPOs.
If you change it to that, it should work (I'm not in front of a windows machine, so I can't remember the exact terminology).

[rocknrollstar]

Great, thanks for your quick reply.

I've simply set the my docs folder to redirect to the home folder in the loopback policy.

Interesting that this is the only one I had to change (the other redirections work fine (and the other group policies applied on the computer). Any ideas why loopback only affected the My Docs redirect (AFAICT)?

All seems a complicated way to simply get the shutdown options removed!

Thanks.

BTW: I already had 'merge' option selected in the looopback options.