Our tech department is preparing to deploy Windows 7 to all of our company's laptop users. However, we have an issue with synchronizing their files. In Windows XP, we would log in as the user (e.g. John Smith) and simply change the path of My Documents to a network folder (e.g. \\Server\Users\jsmith ). This would make it so that when the user was on the network, it would save documents both locally and on the network. The user could take his or her laptop home to work on files, and the folders would synchronize when the computer was reconnected to the network. However, this doesn’t seem to work in Windows 7. When we attempt the same path change, it overwrites \\Server\Users\jmith , changing it to \\Server\Users\Documents . It also doesn’t save any created files or on the network drive. Using Sync Center doesn’t help either. Whenever I manually sync, I just get the following error: The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process. Long story short, we want a user to be able to access their network files locally. Whenever they log off, the two folders should synchronize. When they log in, all changes should update in both places.

Hi, This is a bit of a bug. Have a look at your \\server\users folder in a command shell. You will most likely see the correct folder name. The culprit is the desktop.ini file that resides in your users share. It presents a friendly name to Windows Explorer as it believes the user share to be the Documents folder. The solution is to move the contents of your Documents file to a sub directory i.e. \\server\users\jsmith\Documents , and then update your Group Policy to point the Documents folder to this location. Make sure that the user is the owner of each directory, that your share permissions are set to full for everyone and that you delete the desktop.ini file in the users folder so that the directory listing is correct. Regards Richard