Roaming profile/documents redirection permissions problem
A strange issue has been happening with only one of my users. Nothing about his setup has changed that I'm aware of. Basically, we have a Citrix farm and use roaming profiles. All of our Citrix servers are identical to one another, and the roaming profiles are stored on our file server ("FILES"). The path to these roaming profiles is \\FILES\profile$. Users' My Documents folders are also redirected to \\FILES\users\(username).
When this one particular user logs in, sometimes (not even consistently) he will get the following error message:
"\\fileserv\users\jthomas\
I did some research and saw a recommendation is to run sfc /scannow, so I did this on FILES. It had no effect. I tried deleting and re-creating the user's profile. No effect. I even deleted the \\FILES\users\jthomas folder and recreated it by hand, once again ensuring that DOMAIN\jthomas has Full Control over the folder. No effect. It still (seemingly randomly) throws that error.
If the error pops up, this user doesn't have any of their desktop icons. Attempting to refresh the desktop pops up a login prompt, with the default user as FILES\jthomas (curious, since I'd expected to see DOMAIN\jthomas). If I try to change the username to NYSRWB\jthomas and enter his password, it says the logon failed. If I attempt to use a domain administrator account here, I get a different error message:
"\\FILES\users\jthomas is not accessible. You might not have permission to use this network resource. Contact the administrator of this server to find out if you have access permissions. Multiple connections to a server or shared resource by the same user, using more than one user name, are not allowed. Disconnect all previous connections to the server or shared resource and try again."
I'm really at a loss. I don't understand what's causing this. Equally confusing is the fact that it only affects one user, and not even consistently. I'm not sure what to try next, although I was considering outright deleting the entire user account from Active Directory and recreating it.
When this one particular user logs in, sometimes (not even consistently) he will get the following error message:
"\\fileserv\users\jthomas\
I did some research and saw a recommendation is to run sfc /scannow, so I did this on FILES. It had no effect. I tried deleting and re-creating the user's profile. No effect. I even deleted the \\FILES\users\jthomas folder and recreated it by hand, once again ensuring that DOMAIN\jthomas has Full Control over the folder. No effect. It still (seemingly randomly) throws that error.
If the error pops up, this user doesn't have any of their desktop icons. Attempting to refresh the desktop pops up a login prompt, with the default user as FILES\jthomas (curious, since I'd expected to see DOMAIN\jthomas). If I try to change the username to NYSRWB\jthomas and enter his password, it says the logon failed. If I attempt to use a domain administrator account here, I get a different error message:
"\\FILES\users\jthomas is not accessible. You might not have permission to use this network resource. Contact the administrator of this server to find out if you have access permissions. Multiple connections to a server or shared resource by the same user, using more than one user name, are not allowed. Disconnect all previous connections to the server or shared resource and try again."
I'm really at a loss. I don't understand what's causing this. Equally confusing is the fact that it only affects one user, and not even consistently. I'm not sure what to try next, although I was considering outright deleting the entire user account from Active Directory and recreating it.
Daniel Borger
This can happen if the user proflie is not succesfully logged off the server. Check for username folder under documents and settings. Check into installing UPHclean to help unload the registry so the user profile can be offloaded
ASKER
I've had the User Profile Hive Cleanup service installed on my Citrix servers. Do I also need to install it on the server that holds the roaming profiles?
no, it just goes on the citrix servers to offload hung userprofiles. Sometimes even that does not clean them off, did you have that users profile on the server? It could be corrupt
ASKER
This is something that's actually confused me for a while. It seems that with most users, their folder under Documents and Settings on the Citrix servers is never removed. Should these folders be removed completely from the server when a user logs off?
To answer your question, on some of the servers his folder does appear under Documents and Settings. Should I try deleting them or is there another recommended way to ensure the potentially bad profile is removed?
To answer your question, on some of the servers his folder does appear under Documents and Settings. Should I try deleting them or is there another recommended way to ensure the potentially bad profile is removed?
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ASKER
I checked the GPO in effect for our Citrix Servers and it is set to delete cached roaming profiles. I'll try manually deleting his profile on the Citrix server to see if that makes a difference.