Login very slow

[localzuk]

I am currently having trouble with our domain. The clients (most of them anyway) are taking an age to log on (15 minutes in some cases!)

I have ran netdiag and everything seems fine via that, but dcdiag turns up with

Starting test: systemlog
An Error Event occurred. Event ID: 0x00000457
Time Generated: XX/XX/XXXX XX:XX:XX
(Event String could not be retrieved)

with the message repeated 4 times.

Everything else passes fine.

I have 3 DC's - 2 set as Global catalogs.

There aren't any errors in any logs. The DNS servers seem to be working fine.

Any ideas?

[Midget]

There is actually a problem with this, and MS released a fix a while ago

This is the one you need

WindowsXP-KB899409-x86-ENU.exe

[localzuk]

Hmm... That patch is already installed.

There does seem to be 2 separate issues now actually. The first affects the computer on startup - it gets to the stage before showing the login box and just hangs for ages before showing the login box.

The other does appear to be related to folder redirection, as this is taking anywhere up to 8 minutes to apply (as shown by a script running which leaves a message in the event log, followed by the log message saying folder redirection correctly applied).

The 2 seem to be related though as both were non-existent problems before a couple of days ago. The only thing that has been changed was that I set up the network time service to update the AD machines' clocks from a university NTP server.

The 2 areas that I am thinking their could be issues, because of the symptoms are the SYSVOL, due to it apparently being related to GPO's and the NTP settings.

[Geoff]

If you've got synchronous login/startup scripts enabled and there's an error in one of them it'll hang the machine for the duration of the login script timeout (10mins by default).

[localzuk]

Ooh, I've noticed that one script is in fact not working. I'll try that and post to see if it fixes it.

[localzuk]

And this has solved the problem. Thanks for the help.

[tosca925]

If you've got synchronous login/startup scripts enabled and there's an error in one of them it'll hang the machine for the duration of the login script timeout (10mins by default).

Is there any where you can change this time limit?

[Geoff]

Yes there is, it's the same section of the GPO as the synchronous setting.

Computer Configuration/Administrative Templates/System/Scripts
"Maximum wait time for Group Policy scripts"

As I mentioned the default is 600 seconds (10minutes).