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Crimsonfox
Asked: 2014-03-09 15:47:18 +0800 CST

Start Menu Folder Redirection - Extra items being added

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Using Server 2012 on Win 7 machines, folder Redirection applied by GPO.

It's an inherited network so I'm trying to find the cause of this issue as the previous techs left very little info.

Problem:

One of our user groups has a lot of extra items in their start menu alongside the ones they're meant to have.

  • These items are not found in the folder the start menu is redirected to or the machines all users start menu Folder
  • They appear in new users as well as freshly imaged machines.
  • No offline files being used. Items will not available if network is disconnected while logged in.
  • I can see no GPO causing this after checking with gpresult
  • Users have roaming profiles

Any help getting me heading in the right direction would be awesome.

group-policy

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    I am inclined to think "These items are not found in the folder the start menu is redirected to" is the problem, and that it's actually being redirected somewhere else.

    Are your user accounts so locked down that you can't right click on start menu items and then look at the properties to see where they are located? Can you turn that setting off for a test?

    How many policies are there and how much scope do you have for testing? Can you disable them one by one to find out which one is causing this effect? Have you looked for GPO Preference entries that only apply with conditions?

    Otherwise, I would be looking at SysInternals' Process Monitor If you can login to the computer, run ProcMon as an administrator, click on one of these start menu items, then stop the capture. Then search the results for .lnk and look for explorer.exe accessing it. That might show you.

    If the computers are too locked down and you can't run it as an administrator, you could run it remotely with some fiddling, e.g. http://jamesconit.wordpress.com/2012/11/02/running-procmon-remotely/ and then you could set it running before login, log what Explorer accesses, and then trawl through the results.

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