Teams crashes when using redirected %appdata%

[drkmccy]

Hi, first post here. Hope to use this place quite a bit since I just moved from a corporate IT department to over to an education MSP.

 

Basically I have the same issue as mentioned here:

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msteams/forum/all/teams-javascript-error-windows-10-1709/bdecf01b-0b17-4ef0-aa94-be26e9f1276c

This has just happened to one of my schools who is redirecting %appdata% to a network share.

Teams loads fine when the profile is created but after signing out and back into Windows, the javascript error pops up and Teams will not load. Identical error to the one in the post above:

 

A JavaScript error occurred in the main process

Uncaught Exception:

Error: EEXIST: file already exists, mkdir

 

 

Using Windows 10 Edu 21H2 and latest version of Teams machine wide installer. UE-V doesn't solve the issue as the point of redirecting appdata/roaming is to stop the hard drive from filling up as this is an environment with shared PCs where each machine can easily see 100 users sign in per month and Teams likes to dump approx 2GB of data into that folder.

 

I'm kinda getting the sense that Microsoft doesn't have a proper replacement for roaming profiles and noticed a niche situation in education premise IT rooms with machines that have different users signing in and out all day.

 

Many thanks.

Edited February 20, 2022 by drkmccy

[Steve21]

Roaming policies are legacy and shouldn't really be used anymore (While they "kinda work" still, MS have already said they won't be supported in the future or building things to work with them). In general though, no shared pcs should be having that many different users log in a month really, even with a normal 50 period 2-week timetable that'd be half of that and only 100GB to support, despite repeated lessons etc. Added to a cleaning profile setup for those who don't log on regularly and generally it'd self manage over time, unless you have tiny HDDs which is then more of a problem

 

In regards to your actual error, as you linked it's a bug in the code due to the way it checks if a roaming folder exists already. You'd have to script your own solution to remove the roaming folder, so when it runs the test it can create it (as it'll always fail to find it if roaming), that way it'd just recreate it, but again kind of defeats the point of a roaming profile that doesn't roam But at least it'd be a work around for Teams for you

 

Steve

[drkmccy]

Thanks Steve, yes the drives are pretty small. They were upgraded to 128GB SSDs, a few have 256GB. I should note roaming profiles is not enabled, just redirecting appdata to a share via GPO. This worked perfectly fine until recently.

 

I've just read about excluding the teams folders from the redirection but that means the machines having 2GB of appdata each which adds up quickly and like you said, defeats the point. Profile cleanup might work, I'd just have to tell the users to stick to a few preferred machines in each room or site to avoid them having to wait through constant profile creations. Those Chromebase AIOs are sounding pretty good now.

 

Funnily enough, I was up your neck of the woods last week in Royal Wootton Bassett where we're moving a school fully to the cloud.

[Boredguy]

We've yet to have this issue on our network. While we still define the profile location as a network UNC path, the vast majority of the roaming profile folder itself is set to not upload from the workstation to the path (and AppData itself is not configured as redirected in the GPO setting)

 

We do delete all user profiles at logoff to clean up the drive, which is the only reason for using a defined profile location in AD, otherwise it's a case of waiting for x days to pass and as some workstations can have 7 or more users on it per day that would quickly use up space on our 120Gb Drives.

 

User logons aren't that bad (sub 30 seconds) so it's not too bad

[Davit2005]

I used to exclude folders from redirection in appdata. iTunes was a culprit as it use to take up storage on our servers from people that had the app installed and backed up their phones. It was a few years backup.

 

Maybe you can exclude Teams from redirecting?

Edited February 21, 2022 by Davit2005