Redirected Desktop Icons disappearing Intermittently

[mhundley]

Hi,

 

I have had a search but cant seem to find anything which seems to tie in with the issue I am having.

 

At one of the schools I support we are using redirected desktops for Staff and students, for staff users the desktop icons are administratively assigned offline files so that the staff can use their laptops at home. Intermittently when staff log on their desktop icons will disappear when the offline files sync runs through. However logging off and back on again will often fix this.

 

The Desktop locations are provided using DFS shares and staff have appropriate permissions to read the locations but not to write back to them (We dont want half a ton of other peoples stuff on everyones desktop)

 

The client machines are running XP SP3 and the server is 2008R2, all are patched up to date as of last week.

 

Any guesses will be greatfully appreciated. Obviously this is not a showstopper but it is getting annoying for the staff not knowing whether they will have their desktop or not.

 

Marc

[RageRiot]

try right clicking the desktop and click refresh. see if that brings them back.

[mhundley]

Yes, it does seem to but I am more concerned with the underlying problem, this has only recently started happening and the domain has been in place for over 2 years without an issue.

 

I have tried putting in place a vbscript to be run at logon which has a counter then effectively presses F5 for the user, however if they are in an application this will not have the desired affect.

[glennda]

Any updates taken place? the machines are not dropping connections to the dfs shares are they?

[mhundley]

The only updates are the standard MS ones pushed through WSUS or the required ones from Adobe in order to allow youtube to work, the odd thing is that it is happening intermittently for a couple of users, there doesn't seem to be any pattern to either the computer/user/section of school. Throughout this the DFS mapped drives remain consistent, it appears to be the offline files cache which is the issue but I have no idea why.

[glennda]

I would check all the MS updates which might have changed something minor with offline files but i know when i used to use offline files it did random things which in the end is why we scrapped offline files and setup terminal servers for remote working.

[mhundley]

I'm with you on that one, offline files in XP is pretty bad, however it is old tech now.

 

Would love to get all staff running 7 but until the rest of the hardware in school is up to the job I cant see them being too happy at having to use 7 on their kit and teach the kids to use XP, also I dont fancy the joy of having two different profile types to play with :-)

[glennda]

7 is actually pretty good with old hardware - the old machines we had which didn't run xp well run 7 so much easier. Our latest machines are pretty awesome with 7 (i3's, ssd's, 4gb ram.)