Windows 7: Sync Center offline files keep defaulting to "not available offline"

I've tried posting this question to the MS pro forums and a couple of other places with no luck, and am getting truly desperate. I want a solution, but just figuring out if it's something wrong with my configuration, or if this is a fundamental Windows 7 problem would be welcome.

(This post from a year ago appears to be describing the same issue, but there were no replies.)

I recently started managing a small office network that includes a few laptops on a Server 2003 domain. The laptops automatically mount a user folder off of a Server 2003 fileserver on login to a domain account and are configured to have the folder made available for offline use for when the users are out of the office.

On XP, this worked more or less flawlessly, and how you would expect--files synced and were always available consistently for offline use.



Recently, I replaced one of the old laptops with a Win 7 laptop, and have had nothing but problems with Sync Center. I set up the folder in question to sync appropriately and be available offline, which worked fine. (Note: I am NOT having the common problem where the "Always available offline" menu item does not appear.)

However... when the user creates new files/folders, or saves files from Outlook or some other programs, some significant percentage of the time they default to NOT be available offline. This is massively annoying, since he'll get home and the files he created during the day won't be available.

The files can individually be set to be available offline by right-clicking and selecting "make available offline" for each, but I can't seem to find any way via Win2K3 Domain policy or Windows 7 client setting to get this to default to on for everything in the folder, like it did with XP.

Is this normal? Is there some obvious setting or configuration I'm missing? Did something get screwed up in the migration?