I am a sysadmin with a few Windows 7 Professional machines in our network. The current setup for our users is folder-redirection, with offline files enabled for users with laptops (some of which are said Win7 users). This works fine, just, any shortcut files that are in the users profile (that are made available offline) make the target of the shortcut available offline aswell. Though I see the benefit of this, it is not a behaviour we want. For example if user 'dave' has a shortcut on \\server1\users\dave\desktop, that points to \\server2\files\shortcut_target.doc (i.e. a directory we don't want to have offline file behaviour with) - it will make both files available offline. I'm positive it is related to shortcuts, as the files are always shortcutted somewhere in the users profile and the majority of these files come from word's recent documents folder, and other similar folders for different program. If theres anyway to change this behaviour please let me know, even if it is just a registry edit. Thanks Dan

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I've been struggling with the same issue here as well. User home directories are marked to cache with the offline files feature, but when there are shortcuts in that share the offline files service caches both the .lnk shortcut file, and then also looks at the file it is pointed to and caches that target which can be on a completely different server or share. This behavior becomes a problem when users resume from sleep and the drives don't re-establish fast enough for the offline files service so the share gets served out of the cache. When that happens, all other files located on that share that shouldn't be getting cached become unavailable for that 2-3 minute interval before the connection gets re-established. Extremely annoying. I am pretty sure I can make a workaround by setting the group policy on the offline files service to exclude caching of .lnk files, but that is a kludge and since we redirect the user's desktop to the home directory, shortcuts located there will be blinking in and out of existence. We need a hotfix to make the offline files stop parsing the target files of shortcuts and trying to cache those as well. It's not like that behavior is documented anywhere in the Technet articles on how offline files operates and it causes problems.