What's wrong with minions?

I summon some minions to help take out a mob, but they just... stand there. I walk through a door, they stand around doing nothing and refuse to walk through it with me. They don't follow me and I constantly have to summon more. Is this intended behaviour? They've been doing it for a while now, and since I'm trying to use them as the lynchpin of my build, it's impeding my ability to progress through the game. It's like if you have an army but the only thing you have in your army are tanks and a machine that makes more tanks, except the people driving the tanks are really stupid and keep crashing into cliffs.

I had a similar issue this weekend.
My minion would just disappear before a fight and pitches up right after. - maybe survival instinct??

Anyways, when he's gone, I can't re-summon and it doesn't follow me through portals or map shifts. May be a bug.

I have a pure minion build, they are bad when it comes to AI, but not that bad, are you shure your not laging? They tend to get lost, and ignore for few seconds the target, but after that they atack them. They never stand and do nothing.

Here is some info that you should read:
http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/20086

Indeed, minions tend to wonder off somewhere while not in fight, dissapear only to appear later on (or never) but they do fight (if they are around). Tho for me it mostly concerns zombies, skeletons seem to work just fine.

As for summoning new zombies and specters - you need to have a corpse of a monster to do that. ONly summon not having any required corpse on the ground is a skeleton summon.

Also minions don't follow you between maps, thats an old thing but hopefully fixed in one of the incoming patches. As far as following you between non-leading screen entrances (like the pyramid levels) they sometimes follow you but most often not, so it's good (at least at the moment) to have some kind of ability to kill few mobs at start to ger corpses.
As for bosses you can be at disadvantage (mostly in act 1) but nothing a swarm of skeletons cant fix.

Minion AI could definitely be improved but they are still playable.

There are things that are annyoing but most of the problems can be adressed by using your skills at the right time and place and know what the problems with your minions are.

Minions tend to do better in small spaces (caves,doungeons) because they have less space to wander off.

Most common problems you should know:
- Out of combat Zombies tend to follow you when you don't need them and disappear when you do. So just assume they will never follow you.
- While zombies at least usually try to go after mobs, skeletons don't always do that. Use them as a spell and cast them directly where your target is.
- Use your skeletons before your Zombies because you can target them at the mobs, while Zombies spawn where the target corpse is and they usually go after a random mob in a three screens radius.

Even with all the problems they have I'm still able to do act 2 boss runs without ever dying and high level maps (even with no life/mana regen mod) mostly without ever dying (+% faster mobs can be tough).