Illustrator crashes before splash screen with networked home dir

Question

I’m having a problem with deploying Adobe CS6 in my school’s labs. Actually, this problem only affects Illustrator CS6 as all the other applications of the suite are functioning normally.
Here are some data about our network Environment
120+ imacs of various models (from late 2007 to early 2013)
Each mac is bound to 2 directory services (Windows AD and a Mac mini server)
Authentication is taken care of by the Windows AD server.
Preferences management and Mac-specific settings are controlled by the Mac server
Each user (teacher and student) has a remote home directory located on a huge (21 TB) synology NAS
The address of this home directory is maintained by the windows AD and retrieved at logon
Users can authenticate with no issues and their home directory is correctly mounted on the Imacs. The applications of the Creative suite (deployed through AAMEE) are all working fine except for Adobe Illustrator CS6.
Here is the problem
If a remote user (that is a user with a distant home directory, so pretty much everyone in the school)  launches Illustrator, The application hangs and crashed even before this beautiful brownish splash screen appears on the screen. I can see illustrator in red in the activity monitor an have to kill it manually
If a local user logs in (that is the local admin or the guest user) Illustrator works fine! (Which tells me that it is not an install or dependency issue)
In short, It looks like Illustrator does not like users whose home directory is not stored on the local machine.
Has anyone run into a similar issue?  Is this documented somewhere? Are there some preferences I need to customise to make Illustrator work with remote users? Will it be naturally solved when I’ll deploy Illustrator CC in a month or so?
In case any Adobe employee read this message, I attache the Crash report as generated by my iMac.
Any insight on this issue is very much appreciated. I’m stuck with this one...... heeeeeeelp!!
Thanks and regards from cloudy Belgium!

Answer 1

I confirm what Serge said.
We worked on this issue with the Illustrator team and Illustrator just does not work when the home directory of the current user is not on the local drive.
That being said, it IS possible to make Illustrator work in a Network environment. There are 2 ways to do that.
1) when binding the MAc to an Active Directory domain, tick the "Force home directory on local drive" checkbox. That will create the home directory of the user on the local drive and Illustrator will work fine. The down side of this method is that if the user switches to another Mac (whith is the case in our school lab) his home directory will be re-created from scratch on the new Mac and all his custom preferences and setting will be lost.
2) Use the WorkGroup Manager to create a roaming profile. With this method, The home directory of the user is copied over from the network location on the local drive at logon. As far as Illustrator is concerned, The home folder is then local and everything works as expected. You can have the local home folder be synchronized with the remote home folder at logout (or even at regular intervals during the session) so that the custom preferences and settings of the user does follow him from Mac to Mac
The only case where Illustrator does not work is when the home directory is mounted as a remote folder. That configuration prevents Illustrator from openning.
Damien