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Roaming profiles corrupting every few weeks

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Oct 2, 2006
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We use roaming profiles in our environment. Servers are all W2K3 with Domain Functional Level and Forest Functional Levels at 2003.

I have one server dedicated to housing our roaming profiles. Each person's account in Active Directory points to this server under the Terminal Services Profile tab.

I have been at this job for almost two years and am consistently fighting corrupted roaming profiles. It seems I reset at least two user profiles a day. It isn't the same user each time, but I will likely hit the same user again in about a month or so.

A user will log into Citrix (Presentation Server 4.5) and their environment will load fine. They go to open their Outlook and it tells them they need to create a new Outlook Profile. They can't since permissions restrict users from altering these files in the Citrix/Terminal Services environment. Since they can't, Outlook will not open correctly and not allow them access to their email.

Another thing that happens is, their Internet Explorer will not open anymore. IE 7 is loaded in the Citrix/TS environment. When the user launches IE, they get an error stating it cannot launch IE. This always happens along with the Outlook profile issue and these are the only two symptoms I see ever happen. Nothing else.

To resolve it, I have to go and delete the profile off the server that houses the roaming profiles, plus I run a script that clears the copy of the user's local profile off each Citrix/Terminal Server. Once the profile has been deleted, the user can then log in and actually complete the initial setup of Outlook and IE. Until I manually delete the profiles, users cannot access their email or Internet. We are a 24 hour shop (Fire Department) so it becomes a real problem at all hours.

I've tried setting profiles up on different servers, all with the same result. It is like something is actively corrupting the profiles. In an attempt to try and resolve this, I've made sure our Symantec 10.2 antivirus is NOT scanning the folder that houses the roaming profiles on the dedicated roaming profile server. I just made this change today (6/16/2008), so I won't know if it helped at all or not for a few days.

Any other options or suggestions on how to address this problem would be seriously appreciated. Thanks.

 
are you seeing any event log messages on the servers (citrix and servers hosting the profiles share)??
 
Nothing enlightening, but I will keep checking. I'm really curious if it could have had something to do with the antivirus or not. I am giving the change I made a few days and see if we see a reduction in corrupted profiles or not.

 
Crimson:
I would look in to using Log*In Consultants Flex Profile Kit 5.1
I used to work with 1,400 users (not all concurrent) and 13 Citrix Servers and I experienced this problem also. I would strongly suggest looking at or moving to Flex Profiles, as these fixed everything in my environment. It also significantly decreased the login times for our users.

In addition to the Flex Profiles, I had our Citrix servers reboot every 4 days and had a Startup script that ran Microsoft's DELPROF.exe to clear the Documents and Settings folder.

Hope this helps.
 
AaronBeau:

Thank you. I will check into this right away.

Much appreciated.

 
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