It's been a while since you posted this question. Sorry for the slow response.
The GPO to delete user profiles works, all too well I'm afraid. We set this up for precisely the reason you state and because we have some terminal servers we didn't want to have hundreds and hundreds of user profiles taking space and slowing the server. So I set this to 30 days. Until August everything was just great and we had forgotten about even making the change. Now as teachers return they are missing a bunch of stuff they saved because it was on their laptops and/or computers instead of their network drive.
We have been able to use Recuva to retrieve the deleted files.
This also works well for viruses that delete or move the contents of the desktop.
Now we set the X number of days to 180...
Chris
