Roaming profiles - logging on too quickly??

[mulderite]

Hi everyone,

 

Okay, a really silly problem but one which keeps cropping up at least three or four times a day.

 

We're running Win7 64 and use roaming profiles and we find that if a user switches on their machine from cold and logs on the moment the log on box appears, they are logged on with a temporary profile. If they simply log out and log back in the same thing happens as the cached temporary profile stays on the C: drive. It is not until they restart the machine (thus wiping the cached profile) and wait for up to 20 seconds AFTER the log on box first appears that they can then log on ok. For this reason we make sure all the ICT suites have their computers powered on by our technician first thing each morning.

 

Has anyone else seen this behaviour? If the issue relates to a particular service that hasn't started quickly enough, I wondered if there was a way of changing the order of the services at boot up.

 

Many thanks in advance for any suggestions.

[Hedghog]

First check, I don't know if this is the same in windows 7 but there are two ways I think you can tackle this with group policies. The first is to enforce policy processing before logon and the second is to prevent logon if profile insn't present. I guess someone will be along shortly to improve on this answer

[AngryTechnician]

Check to see if you have this GPO setting enabled:

 

Computer Configuration/Policies/Administrative Templates/System/Logon > Always wait for the network at computer startup and logon

 

If not, enable it and see if it makes any difference.

 

Might also be worth looking at:

 

Computer Configuration/Policies/Administrative Templates/System/User Profiles > Do not log users on with temporary profiles

 

It won't fix the underlying problem but it could help alleviate the symptoms.

Edited May 1, 2013 by AngryTechnician

[mulderite]

Thank you for your suggestions. I can confirm we do already have those two policies enabled.

[AngryTechnician]

Hmm. I'm out of ideas then. I recall seeing this (or something very similar) on Vista many years ago, but haven't seen it on Windows 7. Do your machines tend to be shutdown when they are off, or in Standby/Hibernate?

[witch]

Is it always on the same breed of computer or different sorts? Thinking it might be an issue with POST or something on those machines?

[mulderite]

The machines are always shut down at the end of the day. Policy is set so they never hibernate, but simply switch off the display after 30 minutes of inactivity. As far as I know the issue seems to be happening on random machines, they dont have anything in common in terms of make or location.

[spacebar]

Have you checked the LAN driver settings to make sure the power saving mode is turned off?

 

Windows 7 Wired Network Adapter enters power save mode

 

Worth a try.

[mulderite]

Interesting. I think this is enabled as I certainly haven't set anything to turn it off, but will double check and try that out. Cheers!

[morganw]

Also this is worth a look, particularly if you use anything like Citrix Provisioning Services or Deep Freeze.

Windows 7 Clients intermittently fail to apply group policy at startup