Clients hang at logon

Windows 2003 DC with XP clients all about 2 years old and fully service packed and updated, on a single site.

When you attempt to log on to a PC, i enter the account details, uname and password click ok, the box goes gray and the pc appears to hang if left long enought..20minutes you either get a blank screen or it goes back to the login screen.
Restart the PC and it will log in fine.
Also when attempting to access a network resource the client will hang.

The above happens at random on random PCs there is nothing in the event logs thats relevant on the server or the clients and DNS appears fine.

The network traffic on the server does seam very heavey (but this may be a red herring)

Does anyone have any ideas??

Application Data?

We had this once, we redirected to application Data to a new place and it seems to have solved it, although sometimes we have to randomly delete peoples APPDATA.

Sounds like one or more user profiles have become corrupt.

Does it happen to some users everywhere, or all users on some machines?

It appears to be all users, everywhere. Its being very ahrd to diagnose, as rebooting the system fixes it for a day. then its goes wired again.

APPDATA?? - do you mean the appdata folder in the user profile - can you explan please.

Is it the same if you logon with a user that has no roaming user profile or local user profile?

Can you run ipconfig /all on the server and a workstation and post the result?

What AV software do you use.

I see a blue screen after logging on and then no further, although it doesn't log back off. Is there a setting thats logs users off after standing idle for so long? Its as if explorer fails to run.

My AV is Norton AV and i only see this issue as soon as it is deployed to the clients. I also get RTVScan errors when they log off sometimes as well.

Never really looked into it though.

All profiles are local
just noticed it also takes a while at the log off screen (before closing network contections)

We use Sophos v6

Check your DNS settings and servers.
Check your event viewers, on client and server.

Could be bad NIC drivers, if the pc has been left on for a while windows may have put the cards into standby/low power mode. If the driver is a bit screwy it will not be able to wake it up properly and hence lock up waiting for network traffic.

You could try disabling power save on the cards if you have not already and updating the drivers.

Have already
The event view has nothing relevant and is DNS quite happy

Can you run ipconfig /all on the server and a workstation and post the result?

Also get a copy of netdiag and dcdiag and run them on the server then post any errors.

Hi All,
This could have nothing to do with it but for what its worth (which is just below zilch!)....
We have just gone from Sophos 6 to 7 and the default changed on me!
What happened was that when people went to log off, the AV was trying to scan to whole network drive! so it stayed on 'saving settings' for ever.
Just wondered if it is something similar happening on start up do to the machine trying to access a network reasource?

Might be worth turning off SAV and try it or at least look at what it is set to scan.

Alan

More info
just discovered that I can not ping a client PC while it is at the logon screen or hung waiting for me to login. Its listed in DNS and DHCP.

EDIT: the PCs was networking quite happily (internet and network drives) before log off)

Still on Sophos 6 going to 7 soon - I hope its not doing anything like that

Ok are the trouble PC's in a similar area? Connected to a common switch?

For thouse of you following this with baited breath.....
I was able to log on to a pc with a local user, but could not release or renew the ip address, or access the firewall settings from control panel.
I could ping the server and ping google, not not access the website or ping the client or other clients.
Attempting to stop the windows firewall service did do anything

I'm currently disabling windows firewall.