Active directory home folder connection issues.

[frank s]

I have a Windows active directory environment running on 2000 Servers with
XP clients.
We all know how to specify a users home folder within active directory.
My issue is sometimes for no apparent reason the mapping/connection connects
the client to the parent folder of the home folder path.

Example..
Home folder profile path is: \\server\home\user_name

The majority of the time the auto mappings work just fine.
Randomly when users login there Home drive gets mapped to \\server\home
instead of the full path.

This is a huge issue because the parent folder "home" only has admin
read/write ... so some users get home drives and immediately get access
denied. I'm still not successful at finding an article regarding this. I
don't want to apply domain users read rights on the parent folder because
that setting will get inherited by future folders created by active
directory when setting home profile paths. And I really do not want to have
to go into every single home folder I have and manually correct them.

I find it hard to believe that others are not experiencing the same problem
...

 

[dcrand2112]

Have you been able to resolve your issue with AD home folder
connection issues? I am having the same issue on our 2003 domain and
have not been able to find a solution. I am about ready to call
Microsoft to see if they have a solution. Sometimes the users get
their correct drive mapping and sometimes they get mapped to the
\\server\users folder which as you say only has admin rights. We
have blown away the user machine profiles and have had some luck
fixing the problem on a user by user basis but we are getting more and
more people calling our helpdesk complaining about this issue

 

[matt.heiman]

Noticed this post and wanted to know if this issue is still unresolved?
I am having the same issue with our AD home directory. So far we have
only noted two cases, but I am afraid of more to come and since I have
no solution I am worried that this is slowly going to become a major
issue.

 

[sutors]

Hello.

This is caused by fast logon optimization feature introduced in XP clients. Windows 2000 machines do not have this problem.

Unfortunatelly this feature does not work too well with home drive mappings.

More info about this is in MS kb305293.

To solve this issue implement the following policy on domain level or whatever level you have your XP computer accounts in:

Machine Configuration\Administrative Templates\System\Logon
Policy: Always wait for the network at computer startup and logon
Setting: Enabled