Hi everybody,
It seems that we've found the root cause of the problem. Since Juniper appears not to be willing to publish this solution in the KB, I post it here:
It only happens when serverbased profiles are used.
After installing (or, in our case, updating) the hostchecker which happens offline, the user syncs his profile the next time he is connectedt to the LAN. Ifthe time stamp of the local and the serverbased profile are not equal, AND there are files with a time stamp older than the profile directoty, then these files will be deleted.
According to Microsoft, this is an expected behaviour, see
http://technet.microsoft.com/de-de/library/cc783453(WS.10).aspx
Overview of Windows Server 2003 Merge Algorithm Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP merge user profiles at the file level. The merged profile contains the superset of files that are in the local computer and server copies of the users profile. In the case where the same file is in both the local and server copy of the profile, the file that was modified most recently is used. This means that new files are not deleted, and updated versions of existing files are not overwritten.
When a document or file is updated, the new algorithm compares the timestamp of the destination file with the timestamp of the source file. If the destination file is newer, it is not overwritten.
When a user logs on to a computer, the current time is saved; when the user logs off, this timestamp is used to determine which files are new in the server profile and which files have been deleted in the local profile. For example, if the server profile has a document in the My Documents folder called Review.doc and this file does not exist in the local profile, either it is a new file from a different computer, or it was originally in the local profile and the user deleted it. Knowing the time when this new profile was loaded, it is possible to compare it against the timestamp of Review.doc. If Review.doc was created or written to after the profile load time, the file must be preserved because it came from a different source. If the Review.doc timestamp is older than the profile load time, Review.doc must be deleted because it would have been copied to the local computer at load time.
In addition, some files might need to be removed from the local cache so that items that were deleted between sessions remain deleted. For example:
1. The user logs on to computer A.
2. The user creates or modifies a document on computer A.
3. The user logs on to computer B.
4. The user logs off computer B; computer B has a copy of the document.
5. The user deletes the document and logs off computer A.
To ensure that the files are deleted, the cached version of the profile is synchronized with the profile on the server when a user logs on. All files in the local cache that are not present in the server and that were not modified since the last logoff time are removed. By using these changes, Windows XP can merge user profiles.
Kind regards,
Andreas
