AD user not seeing home dir

[torledo]

Strange, although i'm assuming not an uncommon problem with a particular user account within our AD domain;

 

Client computer is runnign Winxp SP2 authenticating to a w2k3 R2 DC...

 

User account has home directory mapped to a drive letter using mapped folder option in AD, but on some occasions when they login the user home folder is not there. Usually a log off and then log back on restores it.

 

What the cause of this intermittent problem is i don't know, any ideas ?

 

the closest fit after doing a bit of googling is that perhaps the user/computer needs the 'Always wait for the network at computer startup and logon' group policy to be applied.

 

But on closer inspection under the exaplanation for this partiuclar GPO it says....

 

If a user with a roaming profile, home diretory, or user object logon script logs on to a computer, Windows XP always waits for the network to be initialized before logging on. (my emphasis)

 

So there you have it...back to square one.

[jsnetman]

Check the security database on the client machine. Sometimes here on this network after some time it becomes corrupted and causes simailar problems to yours.

 

Try esentutl /p %windir%\security\database\secedit.sdb /o on the client, this will repair it if corrupted and won't do any harm if it isn't.

 

I regulary run a script to clean out this on all the databases from time to time on all clients and often delete the database altogether. It should reinitialise after a reboot and set it self up to take on group policy.

Edited April 28, 2008 by jsnetman

[torledo]

Thanks for that, i'll give it a go.

 

The things is the user was given a new machine with a fresh xp sp2 image last week, and the problem still persists.

[aleach2]

Torledo, I would apply that GP change. We had the same problem about a year ago and I applied that particular GP setting and everything worked fine from then on.

 

My understanding of this problem was that, XP had cached user profiles and was allowing users to logon before the client had got a DHCP address. This meant the client didn’t get the command from AD to map that user’s home space. A logoff and logon fixes this problem because the computer would have got a DHCP address in the time it takes to logon and logoff.

 

Hope this helps?

 

Adam.