WinLogon Guru Needed

Long delay in workstation logon

Published on May 27, 2005 By Chris TH In Personal Computing

This one is really stumping me...

I run a laptop with XP Pro. Up until a few months ago it's only ever been connected to workgroup LAN environments. Then at work we installed a Win2003 server machine (to run some special business software) - it is NOT configured as a domain controller - i.e the workgroup environment is unchanged.

Since that time, my login takes anywhere up to 1.5 minutes regardless of whether it's connected to the LAN or not.

I verified this using Microsoft BootVis. From the outside it looks like the LAN adapters are taking a looong time to come up i.e for their icons to appear in the taskbar.

Every now & then, however, it comes good (usually when the machine is offline) but reverts to the bad behaviour when it gets back on the LAN contianing the Win2003 server. This is usually associated with a registry key (HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\LeakTrack)
toggling from 1 to 0. I can't find *any* net info on this registry key (via Google anyway).

My normal login (my name) has admin rights, but if I login as 'Adminsitrator' then the problem does not occur.

I'd be really pleased to hear from anyone that's got a clue as to how to fix this.

Comments

Phoon

on May 27, 2005

This article says it applies to a domain environment, but you might try it anyway.

You may experience extremely long delays (up to 5 minutes) when logging into domains using Windows XP Pro. This is caused by the asyncronous loading of networking during the boot up process.

This speeds up the login process in a stand-alone workstation by allowing the user to log in with cached logon credentials before the network is fully ready.

To disable this "feature" and restore your domain logons to their normal speed, open the MMC and add the group policy snap-in.

Under Computer Configuration--> Administrative Templates--> System-->Logon, change "Always wait for the network at computer startup and logon" to ENABLED.

This can be fed to clients via a group policy from a Windows 2000 server by upgrading the standard policy template with the XP policy template.

Since this is an XP only command, non-XP systems will ignore it in a domain distributed group policy.

Link

Chris TH

on May 27, 2005

Thanks, Phoon. When I checked this setting it's already configured as per the article.

I guess I can try the opposite (DISABLED) & see how it goes...

Posted via WinCustomize Browser/Stardock Central

Chris TH

on May 29, 2005

Nope, the DISABLED setting doesn't change anything...

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