We have Redirected Folders setup for My Documents, Desktop, and Application Data to a DFS share on our file server. Offline Files is setup to cache these and kick in whenever a user goes 'offline'. Sync also happens on logoff. It's a standard configuration from Microsoft from everything I've read. It's even been working fine for about 1.5-2 years. Just recently we've had reports where some users desktops just go 'blank'.
After toying with it for a while, we can reproduce the issue.
If a notebook loses it's connection after successfully logging on the network:
The offline files sync manager notifies you that you've went offline, but the desktop goes blank and gives you a 'server is not available' error if you F5/refresh the desktop.
If you reboot the notebook, have NO network connectivity at startup, and logon under cached credentials:
Offline files works as expected and My Documents/Desktop displays files with no issues. Reconnecting to the network while still logged in allows for a successful synchronization and the offline files goes back online.
Previously if you lost your connection, the desktop would usually go blank for 3-5 seconds and come back, or a F5/refresh of the desktop would bring it back after losing network connectivity. The CSC cache for Offline Files is correctly being populated.
My hypothesis is that there was a change in SP3 that causes Offline Files to behave differently now. We don't have many notebooks running SP3 so that would explain the lack of reports about disappearing desktop icons. I've played with all of the group policy settings for offline files and haven't been able to change the behavior. I'm going to put our old SP2 image on my test machine and see what happens, if the SP2 image still works!
Has anyone experienced this? Thanks!
