[Samba] Vista laptop in Samba 3.3.4 domain suddenly trying to use roaming profiles?

[David Whitney]

Grettings, all

I have a bizarre problem on a laptop in my Samba 3.3.4 domain. This domain
includes a mixture of XP Pro and Vista Ultimate clients.

I had just completed a migration to this new domain (from a Samba 2.2.8a
domain), and all seemed happy and well - machines had rebooted and were
still active in the domain, users were logging in with no problem, shares
were working perfectly - all over the span of a week or so - until last
night.

Trying to log into my wife's laptop (Vista Ultimate) under her account, I
got an odd message that said "Your roaming profile was not completely
synchronized. Please contact your administrator." The only problem is I am
*not* using roaming profiles in my Samba domain! And this account had logged
into the domain several times on this laptop with no problem after the
migration.

I looked on the home shares for the particular account, and surely enough
there is the "profile.V2" folder indicating what I understand is the attempt
by a Vista box to build a first-time Vista-style roaming profile on my
Samba-defined user share. I logged in under a different account that has
admin privs, and sure enough, it tried to load a roaming profile there, too.
That told me, additionally, that Vista thought this was the first time this
user had logged into that box/domain, which was obviously incorrect. The
profiles for each user that had used until that point were on the machine,
intact.

I've changed the local policy on that box to disallow roaming profiles
expressly, but now the local profiles that had been working just fine are no
longer associated with their proper users, and I'm not sure how to restore
the association (or even if I can). I can browse the machine remotely and
copy the files from that local profile if I have to, but I'd like to avoid
it.
Could the learned folks here offer any suggestions on why this laptop would
suddenly think it was supposed to use roaming profiles on my
non-roaming-profile Samba domain? Is there some mystery setting in smb.conf
I might possibly have set (or perhaps deleted??) that would leave Samba
thinking was trying to use roaming profiles? Based on late-night research, I
expressly set "logon path" to be blank in smb.conf, which is supposed to
disable Samba roaming profiles. It had not been expressly set before. I have
logged into a desktop box and it worked normally.

Appreciate any thoughts or suggestions. The desktop boxes, so far, seem
unaffected and are working normally. I'm thinking my next step is to copy
the files from the particular profile in question, remove the machine from
the domain, and then rejoin it, but I'm not sure I still won't have the same
problem.

The only other problem I've had in this migration was in getting logon
scripts to work (which I never did), but I don't think this is related to
that issue....and the fact that other than scripts the domain was working
fine is what really has me puzzled.

Any thoughts or suggestions appreciated.
-David