Taskbar icons and start menu icons disappear on domain users.

[Chrisb41]

Quickly - I am back Great to see some familiar faces still on here. I went off to Uni for a few years, currently finishing that up.

Now to the problem - At this business a user will login and report their icons are missing from the taskbar, the start menu is also empty but the desktop icons all load from the profile correctly. The profile for Outlook and Onedrive will also reset and lose all the users login information (All data is safe in the cloud with 365)
Example image.

So setup - Server 2008 R2 - Domain Controller.
Client - Windows 7 Pro - this issue has occurred on both 32bit and 64bit.
Redirected profiles to the server + a home directory network drive.
No custom Windows shells etc
Trigger - not known user will login in one morning and this will occur.
No common Windows update that I can find.

I have successfully fixed this before by removing the domain profile from the computer using configure advanced user profile properties in the control panel while using an admin account. The affected account is confirmed roaming and not a temp or local account. Reboot, login and download the profile again and it worked.

I have done the above solution 3 times now for three different computers and users about 2-3 weeks apart, they are upgrading to server 2016 + win 10 early next year and don't want to dump money into researching this problem.

However, the issue occured today but my normal fix did not work. I logged in using safe mode with networking after clearing the profile from the computer and the icons also did not load. During my initial troubleshooting I found safe mode would work but normal boot would not so this is different.

I have cleared the user from profilelist in the registry and I have also investigated this as a non domain issue and just tried to repair the missing icons - all the various lnk files are in the right spot (happy to check this again)

Now logging in with this affected user on another PC works and loads the icons correctly, it does not matter if they have used that PC before or not.

So I am at a loss for if this is a client PC issue, server issue or profile issue.
I would love to know the cause but a fix is required first.

Any ideas?

 

[Chrisb41]

So further thought.

Outlook stores it's profile in Appdata and outlook also resets when this issue occurs. The taskbar icons are also stored there.

So something is going wrong with that particular folder. We make a new user account for now and transferred the data over. But still open to ideas.

 

[goldmercury]

Turn off roaming profiles for a user and see if the problem still exists. My bet is it may be dodgy GPO but worth trying this out first.

 

[Chrisb41]

Turn off roaming profiles for a user and see if the problem still exists. My bet is it may be dodgy GPO but worth trying this out first.

It is confirmed only on roaming profiles There hasn't been any changes to the group policy and I have also checked the obvious ones relating to icons etc none of those settings are setup.

Overall we ended up wiping the local PC and it worked but I think it will come back.

We are looking at a new Server 2016 install anyway and are starting to get some Win 10 computers in.

 

[mtraversSW]

If you wipe the PC and it comes back, then it has to be a server side issue. I would double check Group Policies again. You might want to test by bypassing the domain login and login to the local machine. Does the same thing occur?

 

[Chrisb41]

If you wipe the PC and it comes back, then it has to be a server side issue. I would double check Group Policies again. You might want to test by bypassing the domain login and login to the local machine. Does the same thing occur?

Local account does not have the issue, the domain account used on another PC both never logged in before and logged in before does not show the issue either.

This is the confusing part, if it was a Group Policy wouldn't it always load no matter what? What tells it to only sometimes do it and only on one PC.

I would then say it is just that PC but this issue has occurred on 3 other machines with 3 different user accounts.