I had never noticed this problem when using Windows 7, but since upgrading to Windows 8 I’d seen frequent caching problems from a Windows Server 2008 R2 share. Both mapped drives and UNC paths showed the same out of date cached information, which seemed different to a lot of reports I’d read online that seemed to centre around mapped drives having the problem but not UNC paths. On my server offline files were disabled and the share was set to never be available offline on the server. A reboot provided a temporary workaround, but I needed a more permanent solution.
So after some investigation I started to get the idea that this might be related to caching when SMBv2 was negotiated and used between the client and server. After some further investigation I came across an article on TechNet which pointed to disabling the cache settings within SMBv2 on the client machine.
So adding three DWords to the registry and setting them to 0;
FileInfoCacheLifetime
FileNotFoundCacheLifetime
DirectoryCacheLifetime
Add them to the key below;
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Lanmanworkstation\Parameters
After these had been added in a reboot was not required, and the caching issue was sorted.