Folder Redirection - Windows 7 and DFS

ruffneck · 17 Dec 2010 at 16:04

Hi

I'm having a very strange issue. I have folder redirection policies applied accross our domain and I'm having an issue with some Windows 7 machines. This issue only affects the Documents folder.

Here are my symptoms:

The Documents library is empty
Where the documents library should be shown in windows explorer an empty white icon is displayed.
Right clicking in the Documents library to edit the folders that are part of the libraries brings the dialog up. However, that dialog is unusable. No folder is present there and clicking Add folder does nothing.
Deleting the library and auto-creating it doesn't solve the problem
The shared directory can be accessed via UNC paths and it can be mounted as a shared drive as well.

Here are some screenshots.

As you can see we are redirecting to DFS shares. I have created a test user and managed to replicate this problem, the only way I can get round it is to add the user to domain admins. Even if I add the user to local admins group it has no affect. On another note I don't get any folder redirection errors, just information logs in the event viewer. As I mentioned before this only affects the documents folder, I am successfully redirecting the desktop and internet favourties without issue.

Help meee! I'm close to tearing my hair out over this one!

madman045 · 17 Dec 2010 at 18:39

Offline cache enabled?

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/977229 help at all?

dragonuk · 17 Dec 2010 at 18:43

Hmmm that look weird lol. Never had that

ruffneck · 17 Dec 2010 at 19:10

Thanks for the suggestion madman, I will give that a go Monday although I'm pretty sure we disable offline files in the gpo anyway.

Street · 18 Dec 2010 at 16:41

I have the same problem on my laptop sometimes. If I don't connect my VPN and try to go to my documents they are empty. If I close it, connect the VPN the folders show under my profile as white icons like yours. I've got offline files enabled so that I can access files without connecting to the VPN but it doesn't seem to work all the time!

ruffneck · 20 Dec 2010 at 16:02

Still not any closer to solving this, its such a weird issue

Yamahahahahaha · 20 Dec 2010 at 16:10

Can you map the shares to drive letters then use those in the policy instead?

the.m · 20 Dec 2010 at 16:38

Cant help thinking it's permissions somewhere. The fact that it works for Domain Admins?

ruffneck · 20 Dec 2010 at 16:45

Thats what I'm thinking but it's strange it works in XP not in 7, I can map to the location without issue, I haven't tried it in the policy though.

I will give it a go

ruffneck · 20 Dec 2010 at 16:54

Yamahahahahaha said:
Can you map the shares to drive letters then use those in the policy instead?

Didn't make a difference :confused:

Yamahahahahaha · 20 Dec 2010 at 16:58

Well must be a permissions issue then, sometimes DFS shares are funny about UNC pathing.

Can you access the share conventionally from that user's account? Edit: Yes. Just re-read the first post. Very weird.