Local Profile Changes Revert to Roaming Profile

I've recently taken an IT Director position for my company and am fortunate enough to have inherited the previous system, problems and all. One thing that I have been racking my brain over is that a number of users are having an issue with their local profile changes not sticking once they log off.

The biggest culprit is, "I deleted this icon off my desktop, but it comes back every time I log back in." This has been causing me grief all week, as I have been inspecting the GPO, local settings, and even modifying the profiles resident on the server itself.

So, the server-side profile that was originally created when they initially entered into the domain are over-riding any future changes they make on the local copy of this profile. As the local profile gets changed, shouldn't it sync up and replace the server-side profile, thus making a more current roaming profile?

I am running a Windows 2003 server with Windows XP SP2 machine setup at this office.

Here is what I have done without success:

* Deleted icons from desktop for user, then log off. Simply recreating the issue.
* Logged the user off, deleted the desktop icons from the local profile, and had them log back in.
* Deleted the desktop icons from the server-side profile and then had the user log on.
* Deleted the desktop icons from the server-side profile, deleted the local profile, and then had the user log back in.

For one user I have even added a GPO policy, "Cached Copy Roaming Profile Delete" and applied the security filtering exclusively to one of the users affected. This did not resolve the issue.

Any help on this would be extremely appreciated. I just cannot figure this one out!

 

It sounds like the previous IT manager set the roaming profiles as mandatory:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb726990.aspx