Drive Mappings in Logon Scripts not working correctly

Awhile ago we had a customer call come in. The customer had a major problem in Windows Server 2008. When they tried to map drives through a script it didnt work.

The customer had initially applied a Login script as a start up script and then changed the GPO settings to a login script under User Configuration. These GPOs were applied at the domain level. I know youre thinking already...they didnt modify the Default Domain Policy right? Dunno but I hope not! (For those of you that dont know, its not a best practise to modify the default domain policies. Its always a better thing to create your own policies and link them)

Anyway, on any Windows Server 2008 Terminal Server box, when the user logged on, first two drives were showing disconnected. On any other machine, no drives are mapped.
When someone manually runs the script, it gives an error "The Local Device Name is already in use". Odd...

The support person found that after initially checking the configuration of the GPO, while browsing through the script, found that there is an extra back slash at the end of the share path, like \servernameshare instead of \servernameshare
Once the customer removed the backslash and refreshed the GPO on the Windows Server 2003, Vista and Windows XP machines he had it applied successfully but not on the Windows Server 2008 TS, Domain Controllers and Exchange Servers. A quick reboot on one of them confirmed that all was good.

Who would of thought? A simple backslash!

Michael Kleef

Program Manager