Lots of administrators know to use gpupdate /force to update both the user and computer group policy objects. Sometimes an adminstrator targets the user configuration for things like folder redirection with gpupdate /target:user force. Unfortunately, there is a side effect with folder redirection that is not clearly documented.
When using folder redirection, the sync center maintains an offline file cache in the event the connection to the file server is slow. This is great until one of two things happens:
a switch behaves badly and round trip times for the user and the switch is high enough to trigger offline files
the files cache fills up
In the first case, you would assume that the offline files are available - not necessarily! What can happen is if you fill up the offline cache and then can't reach the server, files will be missing. This will alarm both the administrator, the user, and whoever they frighten by their outbursts.
The other side effect when the files cache fills up is the redirected folders fail to update and group policy objects for redirected folders are not applied leading to an inconsistent experience by the user.