Local Profiles and Group Policy - problems

neathneathneath

Has anyone come across problems with old copies of local profiles stored on local pc's preventing group policy being applied properly. I'm talking 2003 Servers and XP Workstations.

Our IT providers have suggested deleting any old profiles using Delprof (via a script), but the jury is still out on this one.

Main problem seems to be related to applying Internet Explorer Settings, in particular, favourites and proxy settings.

Any ideas please?

gorebrush

Have you tried running

gpupdate /force

In order to make the PC get the current policies?

undomiel

Have you tried running an rsop or gpresult to make sure it is applying the policy? I would run through that first before going around trashing profiles.

dynamik

You might want to look at this as well:

Fixing Group Policy problems by using log files: Group Policy
Interpreting Userenv log files: Group Policy
Interpreting Security Settings log files: Group Policy

neathneathneath

many thanks for your replies - pointed me in the right direction regarding log files.

I ran the RSOP wizard on the affected computer (remotely) and in the right hand tab (logging or whatever), many errors were displayed such as unable to access whatever.bat and all the various scripts that normally runs.
Also the software install policy said GPO applied but unable to access - name of MSI file.

Found that "aliens" had configured the "computers GPO" under Computer Configuration >> Security >> software restriction policies >> type of file extensions >> found all file extensions under the sun were blocked. (we have not configured this ourselves)
e.g. vbs, bat, msi etc etc.

Also disabled "caching" of offline files on the shares containing the users mandatory profiles - this showed up in the log somewhere too and pointed me in the right direction.

neathneathneath

We've had major issues with Group policy not working properly with regards Internet proxy addresses and Favourites, default Homepage etc.

After weeks, even months, I've found managed to trace the problem (which we originally thought was group policy-related)
:
After you enable the Folder Redirection policy in Windows XP Service Pack 2, the Internet Explorer Maintenance policy may not apply

SYMPTOMS
After you enable the Folder Redirection policy on a Windows XP Service Pack 2 (S...
After you enable the Folder Redirection policy on a Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2)-based computer, the Internet Explorer Maintenance policy may not be applied.

For example, the proxy setting or the home page setting in the Internet Explorer Maintenance policy may randomly fail to apply or may not apply at all.

After you enable the Folder Redirection policy in Windows XP Service Pack 2, the Internet Explorer Maintenance policy may not apply

Requires a hotfix and a registry edit but its fixed then