Most of our customers use My Documents redirection and we’ve seen random Offline Files synchronization issues over the years. For the past year or two its been a recurring issue to have someone with a Dell laptop complaining of the inability to synchronize their file. The errors were typically something similar to “Access Denied” and the files that failed to sync were inaccessible in the offline files cache as well.
For a while we would just reset the cache, accept the loss of a file, and move on. Eventually one of our technicians discovered a correlation between this and the EMBASSY Trust Suite pre-installed by Dell on D620/630/820/830 systems for file encryption using the embedded TPM. There was not really much available on Google that would help us equate it to a problem with the application at the time, but over and over we found that removing the application would resolve the problem.
Today I finally reached my max level of frustration on this issue and mandated that our technicians check all systems and remove this app from any that have it installed. Searches via Google turn up tons of issues with this application and the way that it hooks into the kernel disrupting things in ugly ways, particularly when related to networking and the Offline Files feature. Hopefully this rant will add one more to the pile that shows up when searching on Google!
