Dealing with duplicate Folders in a Win7 Roaming Profile/Redirected environment

I am seeing something unusual that has to do with Windows 7 roaming profiles in conjunction with folder redirection. Roaming profiles are enabled on a Windows 7 machine via group policy, and the users Desktop/Documents/etc folders are redirected.

The problem is for some reason multiple instances of the Desktop/Documents folder appear when a users browses with Windows explorer to their home folder. For example we can see a Desktop that is part of the users profile \users\username\Desktop and a Desktop folder that belongs to the redirected folder \\server\share\users\%USERNAME%\desktop.

This behavior results in some users storing files in the roaming profile version of the Desktop and Documents folders resulting in very long login/logoff times while the files are transfered to/from the server.

This is for a computer lab, so using roaming profiles is absolutely required.

We have tried manually deleting all the Desktop/Documents folders that are part of the users profile but they seem to come back. We are thinking about setting up a scheduled task to automatically delete these folders, but surely there is a better way?

The domain controllers and file servers are all Windows 2008R2.

A typical user folder on the server looks like this.

\SHARE\USERS\%USERNAME%

  - *Desktop           (redirected)
    *Documents         (redirected)  
        Music          (redirected - follow desktop)
        Pictures       (redirected - follow desktop)
        Games          (redirected - follow desktop)
        Videos         (redirected - follow desktop)

  - *Downloads         (redirected)
  - *Favorites         (redirected)
  - *Links             (redirected)
  - *AppData           (redirected)
  - RoamingProfile.V2  (roaming profile)

So what is needed to get redirection and profiles to work properly and not have Windows somehow generate the Desktop/Documents/etc folders in the roaming profile? How do you handle this? Is there some obvious fix we are missing?

Answer

There is a group policy setting for excluding specific folders from roaming with the user profile. Setting this should avoid the problem you are seeing. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/814592