I ran into an interesting problem at work today, and I thought I should share it here. We got in 25 new Dell Latitude D531 laptops, and I created a software image to load on all of them. It seemed like a perfect image. Everything was going great until I realized that Vista was not saving the roaming profiles back up to the server. I looked through the event log, but no errors were mentioned about it. I checked the permissions for the profile folder on the server, but nothing was wrong there.

I spent a couple of hours trying to figure out what was causing it, and after about two Vista re-installations later, I finally figured out what the problem was: The ATI display driver from Dell's website. The version they have is from May 2007. On a clean installation of Vista SP1, roaming profiles would work fine until I installed that driver. So I downloaded the latest driver from AMD's website, and luckily the problem was fixed in it.

This problem shows two things. First, it shows just how easy it is to blame Windows for problems that are not its fault. And second, it shows how some drivers are getting too intertwined with Windows. A display driver should not affect roaming profiles.

This is the driver that was causing my problem:
http://support.dell.com/support/downloads/...p;fileid=206423

Man, you're lucky that it only took a couple hours to track down. I could see this being an issue that someone could spends days on figuring out.

That is VERY weird. A display driver should certainly not interfere with roaming profiles. That makes no sense at all.

Very weird indeed.

Indeed Scott. Very weird and probably one of the last things I'd supsect.

Now that's bizzar ... Thanks for sharing Chugg!