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Just as an update, a colleague of mine discovered the solution. It appears that our the aspects of the policies that were not being pulled across required administration rights in order to apply. An old 'everyonetoadministrator' script on the server put it all to rights and we live in policy harmony once more. Thank you all for your help.

Sorry, did forget to mention that all PC firewalls have been deactivated.

To update you all; Have been through DNS with a fine tooth comb, it really does appear to be working perfectly. Forward and reverse pinging works perfectly, including the affected machines. Myself and my colleagues have examined the DNS servers carefully and there appears to be absolutely no sign of trouble on that front. I and another colleague have also checked that the old DC has been completely purged from the system thoroughly enough for me to say with confidence that the operation was completely successful. I will be running through some of your other suggestions and will report back presently. Thank you all once again for your assistance.

OK, I have now created a new OU for the affected users, unfortunately the problem remains unabated. I'm calling off the problem for a few hours until I can think of something new. This requires some out of the box thinking.

OK, to update people so far, though I am still examining a few other possibilities. In order to clear out the old GC Server, we did indeed use NTDSUtil, I have used replmon to examine the FSMO roles and they report to be the current GC server. Despite purging the old GC, when searching for domain controllers its NETBIOS name still shows up. This is proving to be a little curious for me, although it does have to be said that there is no other sign of the machine anywhere else. Running the Group Policy Result tool has initially been unhelpful. At this time at least, the report indicates that all of the policies have been applied successfully. Now it is true that some of the policies have been successful, but certainly not all. I will be looking into this further though, as I am bound to have missed something. Oh and to HodgeHi, no the DC was not down for a long time, but as I am sure you have gathered we have manually purged it from the other computers. Thank you all so much for your help, I will keep you updated as I try some more approaches later on.

I've not used replmon so I wouldn't know I'm afraid. It looks like a more powerful version of it from what I can see though. I have tried switching the ethernet controller to 100MB/s manually, but this has met with no success.

OK, we have completely removed all traces of the old Global Catalogue server. Ultrasound shows healthy communication between the new GC and DC. Propagation seems to be working well and yet I still cannot force the policy to be pulled across on all the computers. It is causing me to wonder if the fault could lie with the machines themselves. It does only seem to occur at present on the newer machines, which do have gigabit controllers, however the registry entry to stop media sense has not proven to be successful. That said, I am not ruling out the possibility of DC replication issues. I have been informed this morning that computers cannot logon when the secondary domain controller is taken offline. This is despite the fact that the GC is still online and supposedly has responsibility for this function. I haven't tested this personally and I do not know what is causing it, but it does make me think it may be related. I will keep people informed of my findings as I progress and as always, input is greatly appreciated.

The problem is the old Primary Domain Controller, which was turned off without being demoted or decomissioned. I'd feel happier dealing with that at a time when it won't cause trouble. I've gone home for the night, so I'll decomission it in the morning and let you know what happens.

Thank you for your help. I have identified a potential problem, but I will have to defer the possible solution until a time when no-one is using the network.

OK, my initial tests have come up with a negative for that idea. I added the new registry key, restarted the computer, applied gpupdate /force, restarted and still found I had the same issue as before. I must admit, this is proving to be more than a little frustrating.

On the new machines they are indeed gigabit adapters. I'll give that a try and see what happens. Thank you. That may well match the correlation that I have noticed

Hi there, we're using DHCP addresses for the client machines.

Hi all, I have an interesting problem and would like to see if anyone else is experiencing the same issue and perhaps see if there is a known solution. We have an issue at present with a number of computers on the network randomly deciding not to pull all of the network policies across. Our servers are running Windows Server 2003 SP2 and the majority of the PCs are running Windows XP SP2 with the occasional SP1 machine that has slipped through the net. In the last six or seven weeks we have begun to find a number of our newer computers not pulling across the network policies for the more restricted accounts such as those for the students and teaching staff. As far as I am aware, this has only happened on our newest machines, which not surprisingly have the latest updates and patches. The problem is, no amount of trickery seems to allow these machines to behave as they should once they go wrong. This extends to gpupdate /force, deleting the machine accounts from AD, reimaging and renaming said machines (obviously placing them in their room OU in AD). At present this has only affected a small percentage of our computers but I am fearful that this will become significantly worse. The fact that this also seems to be happening at random makes it difficult to diagnose. I have spoken to a friend of mine who works at a local college that appears to be having a similar problem occuring during the same period of time and coinciding with a mass update of their clients. Of course that could always be a red herring, we have also updated all of our machines but this is only happening to the newest computers at present. As I am sure you can tell, this has caused more than a few headaches with my brain currently in a state of frazzled disrepair. Has anyone experienced the same problem?