The homedirectory of our users has been set offline. We have configured the group policy "Configure background sync" so the synchronization takes place every 5 minutes. Further more the policy "Slow link mode" has been set to "Latency=0" so that homedirectory is always available offline (slow connection). When a user logs on for the first time, we can see that offline files is dowloading the files from the homedirectory of the fileserver. We can also see in the offline files eventlog that the homedirectory path has transitioned to slow link. After that nothing happens, no background synchronization is started. Only when we fully reboot the computer and the user logs on again the background synchronization start syncing. We want the background synchronization to kick in right after the users logs on, to prevent data loss. How can we force background synchronization to function at first logon?

Hi, Thanks for posting in Microsoft TechNet forums. If only the Background synchronization failed, you can delete the local offline file in case it is corrupted. You can refer to the following two articles: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sqlce/thread/1534f579-d8d5-4252-a048-b34bde66172d/ http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sync/archive/2008/06/26/using-notifications-to-enable-background-synchronization.aspx Best Regards Magon Liu TechNet Subscriber Support in forum. If you have any feedback on our support, please contact tngfb@microsoft.com Please remember to click Mark as Answer on the post that helps you, and to click Unmark as Answer if a marked post does not actually answer your question. This can be beneficial to other community members reading the thread.

No, i also tested by completely formating the offline files cache. The background synchronization still does not kick in. Any other suggestions? By the way, it only does not work the FIRST time a NEW user logs in. After logging off and then logging on it works again for that user. I want it to work the FIRST time any user logs in for the first time, by that i mean, the first time a user logs on when that user does NOT already have a profile.

Hi, It might have something to do with User Profile Synchronization Service. Please refer to the following thread: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/sharepoint2010setup/thread/50e92b07-66d5-4025-894b-efaf0e59330e If it is a server related issue, this inquiry would best be posted to Windows 7 forum: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/category/w7itpro The reason why we recommend posting appropriately is you will get the most qualified pool of respondents, and other partners who read the forums regularly can either share their knowledge or learn from your interaction with us. Thank you for your understanding. Regards,Please remember to click Mark as Answer on the post that helps you, and to click Unmark as Answer if a marked post does not actually answer your question. This can be beneficial to other community members reading the thread.

I don't understand your suggestion, what does the User Profile Synchronization Service have to do with offline files?

Hi, Can you set “Latency=1” instead of “Latency=0” in your policy to allow the share to enter slow-link mode. Setting to 0 is a special case that will prevent the system from ever transitioning the share into slow-link mode. This may be conflicting with the background sync option. Please let us know whether you see any change in behavior after doing this.David Beach - Microsoft Online Community Support

Hi David, we intentionally chose to put offline files permanently in slow-link mode, because we found out that our fileserver has way too inconsistent ping times for offline files to be able to make the correct decision when to transition from offline to online and vice-versa. So we don't want to change that setting.

David, i found out something else. It appears that the background synchronisation DOES WORK at first logon, but only if the user has never ever logged on to the workstation before. Background synchronisation seems to only NOT kick in at first logon when the user profile has been deleted from the workstation. Only when the user logs back in after the profile deletion, the background synchronisation does not start.

How are you deleting the profile? From a winlogon perspective, there *should* be no difference between new profile/never logged on, and new profile/old profile deleted. If you're seeing a behavior difference it may be that we're not correctly getting rid of all the references to the old profile when it's deleted, and this is confusing the offline files cache. From the sound of things you're in a testing cycle with this - can you give us some insight on the testing process that you're using?David Beach - Microsoft Online Community Support

We delete roaming profiles by going to Control Panel\System\Advanced\User Profiles, select the user profile to delete and click on the delete button. However, apparently that method is not very thorough, because sometimes in the registry i noticed that the SID of the user account was still listed under: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList I reinstalled one of my test laptops. For some unknown reason i can no longer reproduce the problem. I will try some more testing tomorrow, if the problem is reproducible again, i will let you know. We are currently in a small pilot phase. We tested basic functionality first on a few laptops. We also tested some often used application to see how they handle windows 7.

We delete roaming profiles by going to Control Panel\System\Advanced\User Profiles, select the user profile to delete and click on the delete button. However, apparently that method is not very thorough, because sometimes in the registry i noticed that the SID of the user account was still listed under: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList This can happen if you have an application that is maintaining a handle to the profile even after the user is logged off. You should usually be able to work around it by rebooting the computer (which clears all handles) prior to deleting the profiles. If you see the behavior consistently, the best thing to do is use Process Monitor or handle.exe from Sysinternals to figure out which application is not letting go of things. Anyway, let us know if you can reproduce the issue again!David Beach - Microsoft Online Community Support