Question for which I'm having trouble finding an answer on Google or Technet...

Does granting the SYSTEM user permissions to DFS-shared files and folders have any effect on DFS replication? (And while we're at it, is there any good reason not to let SYSTEM have permissions to DFS-shared files?)

It comes up because I have a collection of DFS namespaces and folders that I'm not able to make someone else's problem, and while troubleshooting a problem where one DFS replica just wasn't replicating with another for no discernible reason, I observed that the SYSTEM didn't have any permissions granted to any of the files or folders in the folder in question.

So I set SYSTEM to have full control and propagated it down, and our DFS health diagnostic reports went from showing a backlog of ~80 files to a backlog of ~100,000... and things started replicating, including a number of files that had been missing on one server or the other (so more than just the permissions changes started replicating).

Naturally, this made me curious as to whether or not DFS needs the SYSTEM account to have permissions to do its work, or if perhaps it was just any change to folder tree in question that prompted DFS to jump into action. If it matters, our DFS namespaces were set up under 2000/2003, and I have just recently finished upgrading all the servers to 2008 R2 or 2012 (with UAC enabled, blech), but have not yet gotten around to raising the DFS namespace functional levels to Server 2008.

(And bonus points if anyone has an official Microsoft article on NTFS file permissions and the SYSTEM account as it pertains to DFS or network files.)