Hi everybody, my Windows-7-Professional shows a catastrophic synchronization behaviour. That's what I did: 1. activate offline files via SyncCenter / offline files and reboot 2. Connect to Server (SBS 2003), drive Z: (\\Server\c$), open temp folder and create a sub directory called test. Then copied several KB into this folder and marked this folder as "allways available" (in German: "immer offline verfügbar machen"); the folder than had this green symbol for offline sync. After that there was a sync partnership as expected, called "offline files". When I clicked on "synchronize now", I realized, that this took quite a long time for that small directory. So I right clicked "offline files" and chose "open". And there I realized two sync entries called C$ and D$ !!! Windows was synchronizing the whole server! Of course there were a lot off errors, because Windows tried to sync folders it had no read permissions! And there was no way to influence this behaviour, to make Windows synchronize only the folder, I want it to synchronize. What's going wrong here? Many thanks in advance for any help!! Best regards, Tim

Hi Tim, Can you give us some more information about what was in the test directory? Did you include any shortcuts in there that might have pointed back to files on the D drive? I don’t believe that it is syncing the whole drive as it would appear by just looking at the Sync Center partnerships. The unexpected arrival of the D$ would be explained by having shortcut files in the C$ location that was made available offline. The default behavior when a shortcut (LNK) file is encountered is to cache the target of the shortcut to allow it to be available offline provided that target is a file (it doesn’t cache targets that are folders). The following is an XP article that discusses this behavior and the registry entry to change that behavior. The information still applies to Windows 7 and Vista as well: 817275 Office Documents Are Synchronized to an Offline Share Automatically http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;817275 The other thing that you might be seeing is the “ghosting” behavior that was introduced with Vista. What that means is that you will have a place holder for files/folders and levels that are higher than what is made available offline. When offline you will see a grayed icon with an X on it indicating that it is not available for offline use. One way to see what is cached and not would be to go to the C$ and D$ shares and click the “Work offline” button in explorer and see what is grayed and what isn’t. David Beach - Microsoft Online Community Support

The other thing that you might be seeing is the “ghosting” behavior that was introduced with Vista. What that means is that you will have a place holder for files/folders and levels that are higher than what is made available offline. When offline you will see a grayed icon with an X on it indicating that it is not available for offline use. One way to see what is cached and not would be to go to the C$ and D$ shares and click the “Work offline” button in explorer and see what is grayed and what isn’t. Hi David, thanks a lot for your efforts. I never realized this "work offline" button. It worked perfectly and I could see that indeed the system only synchronizes what it is supposed to do. And these grayed X's are very declarative. I still wonder why it took so long back then and why there were so many errors. But looking at it again after two weeks and realizing "your" X's everything is clear now. Thanks again, what you do is really useful, Tim