Snow Leopard comes with a great little new command in mcxrefresh, which as you might have guessed refreshes policy information. This allows you to request a new set of policies and provided the command returns with no errors the process has completed successfully (exit's 0). Use a UID using the -u option and use a short name using the -n option:
mcxrefresh -n cedge
You can also use the -a option, which prompts for authentication when dealing with Active Directory. There's not really a lot to mcxrefresh, but what there is turns out to be really useful.
by 
Is anyone still seeing issues with MCX not being updated when mobile or network users log in?
The real-world use I can see for this is if you set or update a policy option while a target user is already logged in; then I’d send mcxrefresh to the target Mac OS X v10.6 computer with ARD.
I have Snow Leopard test server and laoptops. I just ran a test and policies don’t update when the user goes off the network (shut down, connect to alternate network, boot up again) and back on (shut down, connect back to regular network, boot up again). LAB server and laptop are up to date. I’ll test the command when I get back to the office. If it works, I wonder if it should be included in the login/logout scripts?
Don
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don montalvo, nyc
We can only update the computer policy settings using this on Snow machines. We have network users which some of them require admin rights for their jobs, but feel its necessary to remove the Managed Preferences folder. We can run this app and get back policies for the computer. The user’s shortname in the Managed Preferences however is not recreated.
It would be great if anyone had a suggestion. Please note that a fresh login will refresh everything, but I need to get it properly refreshed after they remove the folder.
End stations – 10.6.1
OD server – 10.5.8v1.1
Same issue when using managedclient -f.