Help with folder redirection and roaming profiles

[Kyle]

Just enetering into the world of Windows 7, got a couple of PC's set up now but we are having a few issues. We have all Home Drectories on the server and use the properties box in the user settings in AD to dictate the folder path, this worked fine when using XP but not with windows 7. When a user logs onto a Windows 7 pc it creates a 'My Documents' folder in the home directores share. We have tested this with 4-5 uses and now we have 5 'My Documents' folders in there which is not good at all?

 

What are we doing wrong? Why does it do this?

 

It seems to work fine with the roaming profile but not the documents?

[tumbleweed]

They're not really called 'my documents', but seem to show as that due to having a desktop.ini file in them. If you fire up a CMD window and do a DIR, ou'll see they're correctly named.

It's an annoyance, I've not looked too much further at the mo'.

[hotwired007]

From my experience - you can't have both redirected folders AND a roaming profile - correct me if i'm wrong please (it would solve some of my issues... all my PCs are Win7 and redirected folders)

[McBridge]

I had a similar problem to this when I rolled out Win7. As far as i can tell there is no way to fix this but as a work around I denied the administrator read access to the desktop.ini file inside the home folder and it would then show the correct username for the home folder. Its a bit of a pain as i had to do it for nearly 1000 users and you can only do it once they have logged into a win7 client but once its done you should not need to do it again, just for new users.

 

Hope this helps.

[tarquel]

From my experience - you can't have both redirected folders AND a roaming profile - correct me if i'm wrong please

 

You are incorrect

 

We've been battling this one for a bit, but are getting to see the wood for the trees as it were.

 

I havent the energy [or time] to go into it fully, but you *could* use this approach:

 

(obviously, you'll need to use GPMC on a Win7 / 2008 R2 machine to ensure u see the settings and that they set correctly etc)

 

- Set GP to set a specific roaming profile path:

Comp Conf > Admin Templates > System > User Profiles: Set roaming profile path for all users logging onto this computer

Put a UNC and use %username% in it for obvious reasons to the location where you want to store the roaming profiles. In the share itself, disable Offline Files use (we've found it likes to confuse things).

 

Redirect your profile folders (to the same location if you prefer, but by way of a different share name, so that you can choose to keep Offline Files enabled still of course)

 

something like:

Roaming Profiles = \\myfilestore\roaming$.v2\%username%\profile (win7 will place it in profile.v2 rather than profile)

Redirected Folders = \\myfilestore\profile$.v2 (choosing the Create a folder for each user under the root path)

 

Naturally u'll need to set your perms accordingly to do this aka so that the users cant go a-browsing, but can create their profile for that first time when they log in.

 

You may need to tweak the other settings for performance etc, and be very mindful of A/V scanning on the file store.

 

We found extremely slow behaviour with NOD as opposed to no performance issues when using FEP 2010.

 

Shout if u need more.

 

Cheers

Nath

[Killer_Bot]

We have a similiar issue though never really bothered me too much. I tend to go to the directory and just start typing the username at the end of the UNC path. When you go into it it then highlights the relevent 'My Documents' folder in the left explorer bar.

 

Just out of interest, could we not just delete the desktop.ini? What purpose does it actually serve for the users?

[deano]

Indeed you can delete all of the desktop.ini instances that appear in the users documents but they are re-created the next time the user logs on. The topic of the documents has been discussed on here in a number of threads with a number of different solutions.

I believe the Windows 7 gotcha post that's pinned to the top of the windows 7 section documents the best solution, in that you create the user folder, named with the username and then create a sub folder called documents within here where their files are stored.

[Killer_Bot]

Indeed you can delete all of the desktop.ini instances that appear in the users documents but they are re-created the next time the user logs on. The topic of the documents has been discussed on here in a number of threads with a number of different solutions.

I believe the Windows 7 gotcha post that's pinned to the top of the windows 7 section documents the best solution, in that you create the user folder, named with the username and then create a sub folder called documents within here where their files are stored.

 

Solution copied from Windows 7 Gotcha as posted by Deano above;

 

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When viewing redirected folders share you may see many "My Documents"

When Windows sets up a new redirected My Documents it creates a hidden desktop.ini file which means that when you browse the share/location from Windows you may see a huge amount of folders called "My Documents"/"Documents" rather then the folder name it should be (e.g. \\server\share\username as the path could look like \\server\share\documents)

The folders are correctly named but when Windows sees the existance of the hidden desktop.ini in each directory it displays the folder as "My Documents"/"Documents" rather then the real folder name. This can happen with any special folder I believe such as Favourites.

 

The solution:

Remove the desktop.ini file in each my docs redirected folder. This can be done with script or using Group Policy Preferences. You can also redirect to a sub folder which hides the issue (e.g. redirect to \\server\share\username\documents\)