Internet Explorer Branding Policy Hang

[Duke]

Hi all,

I'm normally over in the hardware + virtualisation forums so hello to everyone here.

Quick question which some of you may be familiar with - if you configure Internet Explorer through group policy and/or have folder redirection, you may experience a 20 second hang during logon during with the logon screen saying 'Applying Internet Explorer Branding Policy'. There was a fix for IE6 and MS admit the issue, but it's still a problem on IE7 (and IE8 to my knowledge).

There are a couple of old threads about this on here and a few topics on various websites, but there's no definitive solution to the problem. IE6 could be fixed with a hotfix and registry edit, and I think you can fix IE7 by copying over the IE6 branding DLL and doing a registry hack.

However, we've got 800+ PCs here and this 20 second hang is by far the slowest part of the logon, even if people have large roaming profiles. Does anyone know of an easy to deploy fix for IE7 or IE8 for this issue?

Many thanks in advance for any help anyone can provide!
Chris

[Potato-Peeler]

At the moment we have a group policy that sends out the old ie6 brandingdll into ie7. its just a simple batch file but it seems to work well enough.


COPY \\server\lfoldername\iedkcs32.dll c:\windows\system32 /V

[Duke]

Cheers, I might have to give that a try! I've just installed a SAN with flash accelerators and it's a bit rubbish to see the nice fast logons being killed by an IE bug...

[apeo]

At the moment we have a group policy that sends out the old ie6 brandingdll into ie7. its just a simple batch file but it seems to work well enough.


COPY \\server\lfoldername\iedkcs32.dll c:\windows\system32 /V

Could you make the dll file available could you?

[Potato-Peeler]

PM me your email account and ill send it to you if you want.

[Duke]

Could you make the dll file available could you?

You mean you haven't got an IE6 machine hidden away somewhere!

Just tested it here and it does seem to resolve the issue. Hopefully IE9 might actually fix it properly...

Much appreciated,
Chris

[Potato-Peeler]

To be honest im just hoping our network manager will let us bin IE and get firefox :P
I live but in hope.

[gshaw]

To be honest im just hoping our network manager will let us bin IE and get firefox :P
I live but in hope.

Not if it's Firefox 3.5... biggest pile of junk I've had the displeasure of using, so bad it's sent me back into the gloating arms of IE

Btw that IE bug, does it slow down the User Settings or Computer Settings? I've got something that's bogging down the logon times in Computer Settings and wondering if this may be it... haven't got the policy settings to hand as it's on the other network so thought I'd ask

[Duke]

To be honest im just hoping our network manager will let us bin IE and get firefox :P

No MSI deployment or ADM templates so that you can configure the settings and then lock it down. I must admit that as far as business, enterprise and educational use goes, Mozilla really haven't done themselves any favours here. It's a great browser but until I can deploy and manage it (including updates) across the site it's not going on there.

Not if it's Firefox 3.5... biggest pile of junk I've had the displeasure of using, so bad it's sent me back into the gloating arms of IE

I wouldn't go that far! I must admit I don't particularly like it compared to 3.0 either, it's got a few features I had to immediately turn off through about:config, and there's some that you just can't change back to the old behaviour, very annoying.

Btw that IE bug, does it slow down the User Settings or Computer Settings? I've got something that's bogging down the logon times in Computer Settings and wondering if this may be it... haven't got the policy settings to hand as it's on the other network so thought I'd ask

If you've got this bug then you'll know about it. When you log on as a user that gets IE settings through GPO, it'll go past all the usual logon stuff then get to 'Applying Internet Explorer Branding Policy' and hang there for exactly 20 seconds. The most annoying things is MS know it's a bug and won't deploy a fix.

Chris

[ZeroHour]

Is there anything logged in the event log?

[Duke]

I don't think so, but if you go to:

%UserProfile%\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Brndlog.txt

You'll see something like:

10/20/2008 11:36:37 Refreshing browser settings...
10/20/2008 11:36:37 Broadcasting "Windows settings change" to all top level windows...
10/20/2008 11:36:57 Done.

Note the 20 second gap at the end.

[gshaw]

I wouldn't go that far! I must admit I don't particularly like it compared to 3.0 either, it's got a few features I had to immediately turn off through about:config, and there's some that you just can't change back to the old behaviour, very annoying.

It's the crashing that's been driving me crazy, back in the day it used to be super quick and rock solid... now crashes every day and slower than IE... Firefox developer fail!

[apeo]

You mean you haven't got an IE6 machine hidden away somewhere!

Just tested it here and it does seem to resolve the issue. Hopefully IE9 might actually fix it properly...

Much appreciated,
Chris

Yeah, im just being lazy.. its 'Somewhere' much easier if i can just get it.

To be fair i dont think this is the IE branding problem for us but i do get a 20 sec delay on a test profile i've been working with. The branding log shows no delay and its not the file redirection issue either as nothing has been redirected. Dunno what it is.

[Ric_]

I thought that the problem only affected terminal services. I 'bypassed' the problem by not performing IE branding. The only thing I really need to do is insert the proxy settings anyway.

[Duke]

Sorry to bring back a bit of an old thread but I felt this deserved an update:

We've been using this fix to get around the branding policy hang and it's been working fine. However, newly-created user accounts are now experiencing problems where the proxy settings aren't applied properly and as such they can't get any internet access beyond the Intranet. Reverting the GPO script to copy back the IE7 DLL appears to resolve the issue, but obviously reintroduces the hang.

This is likely a problem with our default profile so may not affect anyone else, but do be aware it has caused issues here.

Cheers,
Chris