Quickly - I am back
Great to see some familiar faces still on here. I went off to Uni for a few years, currently finishing that up.
Now to the problem - At this business a user will login and report their icons are missing from the taskbar, the start menu is also empty but the desktop icons all load from the profile correctly. The profile for Outlook and Onedrive will also reset and lose all the users login information (All data is safe in the cloud with 365)
Example image.

So setup - Server 2008 R2 - Domain Controller.
Client - Windows 7 Pro - this issue has occurred on both 32bit and 64bit.
Redirected profiles to the server + a home directory network drive.
No custom Windows shells etc
Trigger - not known user will login in one morning and this will occur.
No common Windows update that I can find.
I have successfully fixed this before by removing the domain profile from the computer using configure advanced user profile properties in the control panel while using an admin account. The affected account is confirmed roaming and not a temp or local account. Reboot, login and download the profile again and it worked.
I have done the above solution 3 times now for three different computers and users about 2-3 weeks apart, they are upgrading to server 2016 + win 10 early next year and don't want to dump money into researching this problem.
However, the issue occured today but my normal fix did not work. I logged in using safe mode with networking after clearing the profile from the computer and the icons also did not load. During my initial troubleshooting I found safe mode would work but normal boot would not so this is different.
I have cleared the user from profilelist in the registry and I have also investigated this as a non domain issue and just tried to repair the missing icons - all the various lnk files are in the right spot (happy to check this again)
Now logging in with this affected user on another PC works and loads the icons correctly, it does not matter if they have used that PC before or not.
So I am at a loss for if this is a client PC issue, server issue or profile issue.
I would love to know the cause but a fix is required first.
Any ideas?

Now to the problem - At this business a user will login and report their icons are missing from the taskbar, the start menu is also empty but the desktop icons all load from the profile correctly. The profile for Outlook and Onedrive will also reset and lose all the users login information (All data is safe in the cloud with 365)
Example image.

So setup - Server 2008 R2 - Domain Controller.
Client - Windows 7 Pro - this issue has occurred on both 32bit and 64bit.
Redirected profiles to the server + a home directory network drive.
No custom Windows shells etc
Trigger - not known user will login in one morning and this will occur.
No common Windows update that I can find.
I have successfully fixed this before by removing the domain profile from the computer using configure advanced user profile properties in the control panel while using an admin account. The affected account is confirmed roaming and not a temp or local account. Reboot, login and download the profile again and it worked.
I have done the above solution 3 times now for three different computers and users about 2-3 weeks apart, they are upgrading to server 2016 + win 10 early next year and don't want to dump money into researching this problem.
However, the issue occured today but my normal fix did not work. I logged in using safe mode with networking after clearing the profile from the computer and the icons also did not load. During my initial troubleshooting I found safe mode would work but normal boot would not so this is different.
I have cleared the user from profilelist in the registry and I have also investigated this as a non domain issue and just tried to repair the missing icons - all the various lnk files are in the right spot (happy to check this again)
Now logging in with this affected user on another PC works and loads the icons correctly, it does not matter if they have used that PC before or not.
So I am at a loss for if this is a client PC issue, server issue or profile issue.
I would love to know the cause but a fix is required first.
Any ideas?