"Ghost folders" showing up in Windows share

Question

I have an Active Directory domain setup with Samba 4.2. This domain uses roaming profiles for all users, which are stored on a "Profiles" share on the Samba server. Furthermore, it uses folder redirection for several profile components, including AppData, Documents and Pictures. The redirects are stored on a seperate "Redirects" share on the Samba server. All these settings are implemented using group policies, and at first glance appear to work just fine.

However, I logged in one user too early in the setup process (for testing purposes) and decided that I wanted to reinitialize his redirects. I therefore deleted the corresponding user folder ("eric") on the Redirects share. Server side, this all worked out. All physical files were deleted, and using smbclient to list the share shows no sign of the folder.

$smbclient //server/Redirects -Ueric -c 'ls'
Domain=[TRAMSTRAAT] OS=[Windows 6.1] Server=[Samba 4.2.0]
  .                                   D        0  Sat Apr  4 14:16:30 2015
  ..                                  D        0  Mon Mar 30 04:16:10 2015
  peter                               D        0  Mon Mar 30 16:52:02 2015
  hennie                              D        0  Mon Mar 30 04:46:26 2015
  Administrator                       D        0  Mon Mar 30 04:58:34 2015
  johnny                              D        0  Mon Mar 30 04:48:38 2015

On nearly all other Windows clients, the folder has disappeared too. However, on the Windows machine that created the redirects folder, the folder still appears too exist! (I can't post images due to reputation restrictions.)

This folder only contains an empty AppData folder. Trying to delete the AppData folder, or the containing folder, produces an error that says that the requested action can only be completed when the computer is connected to the network. Which it is.

This is messing immensely with the profile for this user of course, not allowing him to use any of the redirected locations.

I have tried to look up any synchronization or caching and resetting it, but to be frank, I wouldn't even know where to begin. Does anybody know how to let Windows know this folder does not exist anymore?

Answer 1

For future reference:

Okay, I seem to have resolved the problem by deleting the local copy of the roaming user profile, manually deleting the local user folder (since deleting the user profile via advanced system settings gave the error that the folder was not empty), deleting the profile server-side, and logging in as the user again. This appears to have set up the profile completely anew, including all the redirects. I suspect that this also reset some synchronisation settings so that the folders on the Redirects share could actually be created, instead of just using the local cached version that couldn't be updated.