Using Windows 7, fully updated...

I have had some strange behaviour copying a whole user directory (e.g. "c:\users\bob" to "c:\backups\bob") I understand now that I should have used Easy Transfer or at least robocopy, but at the time all I wanted to do was backup the user's data before using the "Delete account" button. Unfortunately, I didn't check that my copy-paste had actually worked; all it had actually done was copied the appdata subdirectory of the user account. At the time of doing this backup I was logged in as the same user, bob (a local admin) in this example. When I discovered the missing files, I tried again using the domain admin account -- same story. Only appdata copied. No documents folders, nothing else.

Then my boss tried, and it worked fine -- it copied all the files. Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V. I tried again... same profile... copied all the files. Same profile, same destination, same rights and permissions, same ownership, but different behaviour. Has anyone encountered this before and come up with a solution? BTW this was not using roaming profiles and the accounts are stored locally.