Vista - Possible Offline files problem causeing laptops to take an age to start/wake.

Hi,

We run several laptops that seem to have issues with Vista during start-up
and returning from sleep. They seem to take a huge amount of time before the
HDD stops thrashing and for the systems to become responsive. After the
laptops wake from sleep, often they become very unresponsive to the point
that some applications simply stop working (such as task manager). When
trying to reboot they will hang on the "Windows is Shutting Down" screen, at
which point they need to be hard reset.

I had thought that the problem was due to the search indexer, but I now
believe this is due to offline files. I notice that there is a lot of
network activity on the Wi-Fi connection when the laptops start and in
resource monitor, there seems to be a large amount of activity in the
windows\csc folder. All of these file are being accessed using normal
priority. Maybe being able to set these to background priority would elevate
the problem slightly.

We have around 1GB of information that is stored in offline folders (with a
maximum allowed of around 9GB on most laptops), but the vast majority of
these do not change on a regular occurrence. So why does Vista seemingly
keep having to synchronise all these files?

Is there a way I can determine for sure that offline folders are the
problem, and if so can I set it so that is does not consume all the resorces
of the computer, especially on start up which is probably that most
important time when you want to get working on the computer as quickly as
possible.

Chris