Has anyone experienced this intermittent problem before? We have Vista workstations where each employee is allocated storage space (Home drives) on a network drive (on a NetApp storage device). Each employee's Documents folder is redirected to a dedicated folder at this location. The vast majority of employees are having no problems with this setup, but we've recently started having a small percentage of employees whom begin having strange permission problems on this network drive via their Documents folder. First off, NTFS permissions have been confimed as correct on each person's respective folder (each has been granted Full Control). In each random case, the users experience intermittent "access denied" errors when trying to save files (Word docs, Excel spreadsheets, even jpg files) to their own Home drive. The problem typically occurs regardless of whether they're trying to save the docs within an application (Word, Excel, etc) or manually via a Windows Explorer window. For example, one user could save an Excel file to a subfolder within the Documents root folder, but moments later couldn't save a jpg to the same folder. It was verified that she has Full Control of both the Documents root folder as well as the subfolder containing the documents. Another user can save Word and Excel files to his Documents, but then can't open them shortly afterwards (Access Denied). It was verified that he has Full Control of both the Documents root folder as well as the subfolder containing the documents. NTFS permissions are set correctly on the network share, but yet we're still having some strange permission issues. Are there any recommended registry entries to check since we're redirecting Documents to a network drive? Checking the security log on the NetApp filer hasn't turned up anything useful, and I suspect that the problem lies somewhere before NTFS comes into play and instead in the Vista realm (registry issue related to Documents on network share).

Sabrina, to answer your questions: Yes, the folder can be accessed via both of these: UNC \\computername\folder and \\IPAddress\folder. We cannot grant "Everyone" access to the folders, as they're private Home drives for each respective employee. I did, however, confirm that the specific user name that each person was using had Full Control from their Home drive root folder all the way down through the sub-folders. They're all also designated as the Owners of each respective folder chain. This problem only occurs when using the "Documents" folder that our Active Directory sets for each user on a shared network drive. If each user creates a folder structure outside of "Documents" on the same network drive (but still within each respective user's root folder), the problems disappear. The problem cannot be reproduced 100% of the time, as it is intermittent in nature. Moving a file from the local workstation to the network drive may fail 5 straight times, and then succeed the next day, even if nothing has changed. I tested the GP updates suggested, had one impacted user reboot, reset their password, and found that the intermittent Access Denied problems remain present.