Roaming profile start menu not merging with local start menu

[OverWorked]

Hello,

 

The start menu in the user's roaming profile is not getting merged with the start menu in the local all users profile. This only affects Win 7 / Server 2008 R2. XP is OK.

 

To elaborate:-

When a user logs onto a Windows 7 machine or Server 2008 R2 machine, there are group policy preferences to create shortcuts in their start menu\programs folder. It works in XP, and in Windows 7/2008 the shortcuts do get created in the users\%username%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs folder, but the user cannot see the shortcuts when they click the start/all programs button.

 

The user just sees the local start menu - their profile start menu isn't merged with it.

 

I've spent hours on this and cannot understand why this is happening. The Start Menu and App Data folders are not redirected.

 

It works perfectly for the desktop - I can create shortcuts for the desktop and the users sees a combination of the machine's desktop shortcuts and theirs.

 

Any ideas why the start menus don't merge?

 

Thanks.

[OverWorked]

Answering my own post again...

 

Fixed it. It was a single Group Policy setting.

 

User Configuration/Administrative Templates/Start Menu and Taskbar/Remove user's folders from the Start Menu

 

This was enabled. I changed it to not configured and the start menus are now merged from the local machine and the user's roaming profile.

 

The behaviour of this setting has changed from XP to Win7. I don't know if this is a bug, or design, but the behaviour is not as described in the setting's description. This has taken me about 6 hours of methodical troubleshooting.