What I've found is that any user-level managed preference, regardless of what it is - e.g.: Flip4Mac's version checker, "show hard drives on desktop" - causes the home directory to not mount. Even a single key. This occurs on 10.7.5, 10.8.4, 10.8.5 and 10.9.0 on Casper 9.2. At present I have all user-level managed preferences turned off in order to restore home directory mounting, as it's a higher priority to me. What I found is that adding any user-level managed pref also added some unwanted stuff to the loginwindow (not com.apple.loginwindow, just loginwindow) domain that seems to mess with homedir mounting.

Do an mcxquery and an mcxquery -user username with your user-level managed preferences on. Repeat with them off (add the computer into the Exclusions section). Then use "diff" (or equivalent comparison, e.g.: TextWrangler) to compare the results. You may find there's differences aside from the ones you expected.

Unfortunately, Configuration Profiles are currently also a bit buggy too: https://jamfnation.jamfsoftware.com/discussion.html?id=8442

I've logged it with JAMF, worked around it for now, and looking at the fix mount script.

Yeah -- see:

https://jamfnation.jamfsoftware.com/discussion.html?id=8914

and

https://jamfnation.jamfsoftware.com/discussion.html?id=8279

This has been a big issue since 9.X -- I had a script made a long while back to assist in working around this for now. https://gist.github.com/GSquared/6fcd0d0da615ba213647

It is filed under defect D-005615 from JAMF, they definitely know about it!

Does anyone know if this was fixed in the 9.24 update? I don't see it listed as a known issue but I don't see it listed as fixed either.

So this is still happening to me, but only when there are certain config profiles and/or policies applied. Problem is, I don't know which ones, it's completely weird. Btaitt, I read your post above that said your issue was due to a bad managed preference and then something regarding a config profile that was fixed in 9.21. I tested this just now and I am still experiencing the problem - no managed preferences are being applied to my machine. I do have a login window config profile but I don't think it's the culprit since I can get the homes to mount with that profile applied. I've tried making my test machine a member of a group that has 2 config profiles and 3 policies in scope - when it's a member of the group, I get the question mark. When it's outside the group (zero policies/config profiles in scope), the network home mounts fine. When I started applying each of those policies and config profiles individually - not just one at a time, but incrementally - it's fine too, which makes zero sense to me because they all add up to everything that was being applied when the computer was a member of the group.

Since my last post on this thread I've upgraded to Casper 9.24 and am using an OS X 10.9.2 base image.

This has worked fine for us since the 9.32 update.