We recently replaced our old Win 2003 Domain Controller with a Win 2008 R2 DC. As a result of that, we are now able to use GP preferences. I wanted to retire the .vbs scripts we had been using to map drives and use GP preferences instead.
I setup a test OU and created a test user and started to experiment and discovered pretty quickly there were timing issues with GP updates.
I know the normal GP update behavior in AD is that workstations check for updates every 90 minutes with a +/- 30 minute randomness to prevent all workstations form checking in all at once. I was using "gpupdate /force" to make sure the workstation was picking up the latest edits but I was seeing that changes I'd made to drive mappings were not showing up.
After using several Win XP and 7 workstations for testing, I noticed that my drive mapping changes were sometimes showing up immediately and sometimes not showing up for 10-15 minutes. That sure makes testing tedious.
I assumed GP edits became immediately available on a local domain controller but is that not the case?
VB scripts, for all their disadvantages, are sure a lot easier to work with since the results are immediate.