I've just got two new machines from Dell and did a fresh reinstall of Win7 64 bit pro to remove the obligatory dell preinstalled crapware, joined my domain and rebooted.
For some reason the home page in IE still points to dell.com even though I've set it in Group Policy. I can run RSOP on the new machine, and they show that the home page should be reset to my company intranet page, but when I open an IE window it goes to dell. I can, of course, manually reset the home page in IE but I would rather take this as a learning experience to find out why IE doesn't listen to Group Policy.
Anybody had this experience in the past?
I have a vague recollection of an incompatibility with folder redirection and IE Maintenance policies (specifically proxy server settings) that caused us problems when deploying Windows XP around 10 years ago, I'm sure that got patched shortly after it was discovered, so I doubt this is the problem you are seeing.
Another thing I've had success with in the past when IE setting don't apply is to clear the IE Maintenance settings, and then re-create them, as per the image below.