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I've got a customer who thinks our application is constantly deleting all it's data. It's really becoming a major problem for them.

The problem is, there's no way it's us. They are losing not only our entire data folder (which we locate in the user's "My Documents" folder to make it easy to find), but some local settings files which are in entirely different places within the general user profile.

It REALLY looks like the entire user is either getting reset, or is somehow synchronizing with a more... blank profile somewhere else.

They're running this on some kind of virtualized Citrix guest OS.

I see references to a "group policy folder redirection" that could do this... maybe roaming profiles?

Any ideas?

Help!

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  • Improper folder redirection settings can easily cause this to happen. Does this occur with other files? The customer should get in contact (or you get in contact) with their IT department to figure out what's going on. It sounds like a VDI setup.
    – Nathan C
    Nov 5, 2013 at 21:41

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From my experience with roaming profile configurations, there are a few issues that can occur.

If the profile is corrupted/damaged, or somehow already locked/in-use, most systems will load a local "temp" profile that is blank so the user can at least get access to the system. Profile-specific files/settings will not be loaded of course. This temp profile will be deleted when the user logs out (at the very least it will not be re-used - I've seen cases in Windows environments where machines had hundreds of old temp profiles built up as people continued to use a system that had lost access to the file server where the profiles were located).

Similar behavior is seen if the storage location where the profile data is hosted is unavailable to the client machine on login. (For example, a network issue prevents the client from accesing network-based storage). A temp profile will be generated and this will be used for that session.

Another possible issue is that securities/permissions are set wrong on the folders that are defined in the redirection GPO. The client will attempt to use the folders in the location defined in the GPO but will be prevented by the security ACLs. In this case they would probably be getting a lot of errors when they logged in though.

Lastly (and perhaps most likely?) it's entirely possible they are simply using a policy that intentionally scrubs changes to those portions of the user profile. Some companies do this to keep users from making unauthorized changes - as soon as they log out and back in, the profile is reset to 'default'.

So, to fix this, I would start by gathering more information about their environment. What exactly are their roaming profile policies, and how do they impact the locations your application needs to save data? Is it "expected" behavior to lose those portions of the user profile?

Other questions to ask are: is this happening to all users, or just some? What are the common factors between those users?

A decent way to isolate the roaming profiles as the culprit would be to have them create a user account that doesn't use roaming profiles. Verify if the same issue occurs, or if your application works as expected.

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  • After I relayed a few of the possibilities you enumerated and some of my own... they said they fixed the problem. They didn't quite tell me what specifically was wrong, though.
    – darron
    Nov 9, 2013 at 4:59

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