Disabling offline files removes pinned items from Windows 7 task bar?

  • Article

When I review the forum threads, I found an interesting issue about offline files and pinned items.

Symptom:

Users may not be able to pin items to their taskbar or Start menu, or pinned items may disappear the next time the user logs in if desktop is redirected to a network file server and offline files are disabled.

But if offline files are enabled and re-login, the pinned items will re-appear on the task bar.

Cause:

This occurs becuase Explorer needs permission to read from user shell folders when adding items to the taskbar. The SMB read permissions are more restrictive than NTFS read permissions, so Explorer is not able to access the folders and cannot load the pinned items.

Solution:

To resolve this issue, set the share permissions to Read and Change or Full Control. The folder can be restricted to read only using file system (NTFS) permissions on the file server, but the share permissions must be at least Read and Change.

Reference:

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/winserverGP/thread/53a6a7f1-8fb6-47e8-bf8d-c1b03e8d4575/

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/w7itpronetworking/thread/3c60c3f6-6682-4ab4-9369-b3ecac62fcf2

Comments

  • Anonymous
    September 12, 2011
    I have exactly the problem described in this post, but the share permissions are already set to Full Control. Do you have any additional information regarding the "user shell folders"? What exactly is the path that explorer needs?

  • Anonymous
    October 26, 2011
    Has anyone solved this issue??

  • Anonymous
    May 16, 2012
    I have the same issue, however everyone already has full control.

  • Anonymous
    November 19, 2012
    This does not work, everyone would have obviously set the network redirected folder  with modify access. Please remove this as it is not a solution.

  • Anonymous
    December 05, 2012
    I have the same problem and the solution above also doesn't work for me

  • Anonymous
    March 14, 2013
    Well, I can create pinned items on Taskbar or Start Menu, but visibility of these shortcuts gets lost on each logoff. The only way to bring it back is is force restart explorer wmic process where name="explorer.exe" call Terminate Then thay are visible in the session. Offline files GPO is not used, folder reditection to server share IS used

  • Anonymous
    May 08, 2014
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    August 30, 2014
    This helped!
    I lost the taskbar icons after redirecting Desktop to a folder in a subst drive, which was not available when explorer.exe loaded. Changing the path to an available folder should solve the problem but did not, because the Desktop folder (or the old shortcuts in it) were now read-only.
    So, making the Desktop folder available when explorer.exe loads and removing the Read-Only attribute from the Desktop folder solved it for me.

  • Anonymous
    May 15, 2015
    Many thanks for this. I spent a whole day searching and this worked for me.

  • Anonymous
    July 23, 2015
    2003 redirects to %application data
    2008 redirects to %appDataRoaming (Unless you chose 2000 blah under the GPO options)