Logon problem with Active Directory

Question

I maintain iMacs and Mac Pros connected to a Windows campus network using a combination of Mac OS X's Active Directory utility and DAVE, a Windows file and print sharing software from Thursby Software. I have found that a handful of users cannot connect to the network. They can log on, but they get the default screen and the sparse default Dock. The campus network services are not available to them.
I have found on studying the issue is that their active directory accounts of aliases in lower-case letters; in contrast, the vast majority have aliases in upper-case letters. Evidently, users with upper-case aliases in their Active Directory accounts can enjoy full network access, whereas those with lower-case aliases do not.
Is there an underlying issue here that keeps users with lower-case aliases from accessing both Apple and network resources, or should I look elsewhere for the cause?

Answer 1

There are several folders in the User Template on Leopard. One, English.lproj, is what I use to store the user template settings. There are also two others, user.template and non-localized.
user.template is a truly root-level folder which is inaccessible from the Aqua visual interface; when unlocked its icon turns into a folder. In terminal mode, logged on as root, I found a basic set of folders. I decided to leave those alone.
non-localized appears to be the same thing as English.lproj; it certainly has the same set of user folders. I decided to copy the folders and settings I made for English.lproj into non-localized. I invited another person with the lower-case alias problem to log on. He got the entire configuration, wallpaper, Dock and all. I confirmed this with the same person I had test the log on yesterday. He too got the whole config.
So it is evident that Leopard was using information from LDAP/AD to determine which template to download. The majority with the upper-case aliases gets the configuration from the English.lproj folder; the lower-case-alias minority get the non-localized configuration, i.e., nothing at all. Knowing this, I can now prepare our iMacs to accommodate everyone.