Offline Files turns itself OFF.. tried everything HELP please!

[WildIrish]

I have two laptops running XP Pro under a Windows 2003 Active Directory

structure. One laptop's Offline Files works great.... the other USED to
work
great, don't know what happened.

If I checkmark the "Enable Offline Files" under My Computer, and
checkmark
the "add a link to my desktop" it will enable itself for the length of
time I stay logged in. Once I restart or log back in, within a few
seconds I see the link
on the desktop dissapear and the Offline Files are diabled (unchecked)
automatically.

Ive tried setting the cache size to under 2gig, tried clearing the
cache, tried a bunch of registry changes I'd seen listed on google but
all to no
avail.

ALSO, if this helps... the My Computer / Tools / Synchronize... menu
selection does absolutely nothing.

IN ADDITION, I was doing some registry cleanup removing 'startup' group

items to increase my performance and fighting a Bluetooth cellphone
link, i
may have disabled something THINKING it was related to cellphone sync.
Please
help me figure out what the required entries are in startup for Offline

Files or any other suggested solutions, this is driving me nuts.

Thanks again!
-B

 

[Dave Nickason [SBS MVP]]

I'm assuming that both of these laptops are domain members and live in the
same OU, so that the same domain group policies are applied to each? If
that's the case, you could see if a local policy was configured on the one
that keeps resetting itself. Start -> Run -> MMC. Add the Group Policy
snap-in. You'll find the relevant settings under Local Computer Policy ->
Computer Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> Network -> Offline
Files. Alternatively, you could use the Resultant Set of Policy snap-in to
see what group policies are being applied and from where.

 

[WildIrish]

All the GP stuff under Offline Files is set to Not Configured. I went
into Resultant Set of Policy snapin,
and saw no entry for Network / Offline Files so I'm not sure if it
either ISN'T there for a reason
or if this is a problem... ive never used Resultant Set before so
please let me know your thoughts.

Thanks for your time, appreciate it on this strange problem I can't get
past. I've spent hours fighting it.

-B

 

[Dave Nickason [SBS MVP]]

Sounds like you used RSoP correctly. There's not much of a way to mess that
up, so I think you can rule out group policy as the cause of your problem.
I did a little research on this without finding anything in TechNet, but
google came up with
http://blogs.msdn.com/jonathanh/archive/2004/12/02/274078.aspx, which seems
like a good starting point to find a reason for this.

The only other thing I can see that could be causing it is fast user
switching, which will not work on a domain member PC anyway. I actually
doubt that this would disable the option as opposed to just causing a sync
failure, but at least you could go into Services and verify that Fast User
Switching is not running.

 

[Will Niccolls]

I've seen similar behaviour in the past on a user. I believe part of the
problem was that ownership of some files was to attributed to a deleted
user. I think after taking ownership of all the files, recursively, by the
proper owner, then the synchronization happened correctly. The "synch"
folder icon never reappearred, so his MyDocs looks like its local, not an
offline folder. But no matter, it does synch correctly to the server.

So check the ownerships for SID of deleted users maybe.

Also maybe delete and recreate the offline files cache. Don't know the
commands but someone here might have a reference?

 

[Dave Nickason [SBS MVP]]

To clear the cache, you just go to Windows Explorer -> Tools -> Folder
options. On the Offline Files tab, click Delete Files.

This all makes sense except that I think a permissions issue would cause a
sync failure rather than for the service to just become unavailable at
reboot.

 

[robertharvey]

structure. One laptop's Offline Files works great.... the other USED to
work
great, don't know what happened.

I gave up on offline files. Not only did it do the sort of thing you
describe, or continue to waste time syncing the same unchanging things
over and over, or use up all the space on the smallish C: partition
with no way to tell it to use d:. But when I really, really needed the
files they weren't there. Just the directory structure. I seemed to
have decided to save space by throwing away the files I thought it was
lugging round the world.

I went back to a manually created shadow tree and a batch file with
robocopy.

 

[Todd J Heron [MVP]]

I still like "My Briefcase".