I can also attest to the fact that roaming profiles are nightmarish in this regard. There is no easy solution. I would suggest using folder redirection as much as possible, so that the only data actually synchronized by windows is data that the user doesn’t directly create like registry files, etc. It’s going to become worse if you end up in a mixed Vista and XP environment, because the folders all have different names, among other things. (http://tinyurl.com/yccs3c)

 

I would have expected that the roaming profile system checked the datestamp of the files themselves before determining which are the most recent.  Unfortunately it appears to only look at the datestamp of the user’s top level folder and in this case proceeded to destroy user data when they arrived the next day.  We were able to stop the process in good time but quite a few users lost a lot of data.  We do not use roaming profiles now.