Windows Server 2003 Group Policy Replication

I have two Windows 2003 servers in my office. One is the Small Business edition and one is the Standard R2 64-bit edition.

Being a small business, the SBS machine has been the sole domain controller, and we recently promoted the W2K3 R2 machine to be another DC. I had a few problems doing this, but I believe I've gotten most all of them ironed out except one involving GPOs.

I have a SYSVOL network share on both DCs. (FYI When i ran dcpromo, they were not automatically created so I had to do that by hand. I matched up all of the permissions and the folder tree that I've found on Microsofts KB articles.)

Here's the scenario:

When creating a new GPO on the first DC, the folder for the GUID is successfully created in the c:\windows\SYSVOL\domain\Policies folder (literal word "domain", not the domainname) and also in the c:\windows\SYSVOL\sysvol\{domainname}.local\Policies folder, which is where the SYSVOL network share is located.

The GPO GUID folder is successfully replicated to the second DC almost immediately into the folder I created, which is s:\sysvol\domain\Polices. However, the policy is never copied to location of the SYSVOL network share on this second DC, which would be at s:\SYSVOL\sysvol\{domainname}.local\Policies.

Therefore, this DC and any stations that would connect to it for GPO processing get a Userenv error that gpt.ini cannot be found and that processing was aborted.

Any help in straightening this out would be appreciated. FYI When running dcdiag /q and netdiag /q, both are error-free and I'm not seeing any NTFRS errors. And again, the policy does make it to the second server, just not into the second folder.

Thanks in advance.

The solution to my issue was detailed at MS KB 842162, specifically steps 8-11. I had all of the pieces in place, but this was what I needed to tie them all together.

Apparently I needed to create a junction point between the directories. Since that was missing, the contents were replicated server-to-server, but not into the SYSVOL share.

The only exception to the process detailed in the KB for me was that step 11 tells you to use the "linkd" command to create a NTFS junction point. linkd is not available in 64-bit form (at least not that I was able to find) so I used a program called "Junction" from MS Sysinternals. That is located here and did the trick just fine. My GPOs are now replicating and processing successfully on both servers. Hope this helps some with the same issue.