Greetings.
My IT shop redirects the My Documents, My Pictures, My Videos, and My Music to our user's home directories. In the past we did this though the %HOMESHARE%%HOMEPATH% variable, where the GPO created a My Documents folder in the root of the home directory, and we configured the GPO to store the other three folders inside the My Documents folder.
The problem we ran into recently was when we wanted to move the user home directories to a new server and share, all of the recent documents on the user workstations referenced the those file through the UNC path of the %HOMESHARE%%HOMEPATH% folders, which caused us to have to write scripts to go into the registry and modify the path of the recent documents and other files to reflect the new home directory path UNC. This seemed to apply to any file stored in the "My Documents" feature of Windows, including Outlook Archive.PST files where Outlook thinks are stored in a UNC path.
We experimented with the GPO setting "Redirect to the user's home directory" hoping it would start referencing the H: drive as this is their defined home directory drive, but instead the GPO still references the UNC path, and this time user workstations switched to using the root of the home directory as the My Documents folder versus using the pre-existing My Documents folder in the home directory. I.E. The My Documents folder became the UNC version of H:\ versus the former UNC version of H:\My Documents.
We looked at trying to specify int he GPO the "H:\My Documents" folder as the redirection point, but the GPO editor warns against not using a UNC path, so we didn't try to force it.
So the question is - how can we get the folder redirection to use the user's home directory drive letter and not a UNC path, so we can later on move the home directory without breaking all of the user workstation recent documents and other files stored in the My Documents path because they reference a UNC and not a drive letter?
As a side note the folder redirecton shows the user the UNC path when they open the My Documents folder, and we would really prefer it just say H:\My Documents to avoid confusion.