Home directories deleted

[Werner Gaubatz]

Hello Jeremy !

I had the same problem not too long ago ....

>   I am having a rough time figuring out what is going on in one of our
> classrooms. It has 4 NT4 SP4 machines which randomly decide to delete
> users home directories (H: in this case). Some get completely deleted
> (including directories). The machines have Netscape 4.6, Eudora Lite
> 3.0, SAS, Sigma Plot, MS Office, Corel Word Perfect Suite, and Adobe
> Acrobat Reader 4 installed. I read on a previous article in May about
> Netscape 4.51 on NT4SP3 machines deleting the home directory but wasn't
> sure if this was the problem. There are no strange signs in the logs. 
> 
> Can anyone help? or give any tips on how I could narrow the problem
> down?

Several $HOME-Dirs were completely deleted directly after the user
started netscape. Using MS-Office, Acrobat Reader, Micrografx Designer,
Corel Draw, AutoCAD LT etc. before starting netscape didn't not cause
any problems. I dont have SAS, Corel WordPerfect or Eudora. 

So i think something was very wrong with my the installation of
netscape on the two affected computers. I tested some more computers 
after a restore of the deleted $HOME-dirs.

The home dirs were left O.K. even with netscape, if one of the 
affected users logged in from another computer.

I'm not sure wether Dr.Solomon Antivirus Toolkit created all the 
troble. I installed a new version of netscape onto these computers 
not too long before with Dr.Solomon running. 

After a complete reinstall of the who computers the problem went away. 

Hope i could help you.

Werner

  Any sufficiently advanced bug is indistinguishable from a feature.
    -- from some indian guy

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Dr. Werner Gaubatz                    Tel: +49 (89) 289 12182
FRM-II Bau                            Fax: +49 (89) 289 12112
Technische Universit"at M"unchen      mailto:gaubatz at physik.tu-muenchen.de
D-85747 Garching /  Germany           http://www.frm2.tu-muenchen.de
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