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'Welcome' screen hang on random computers at random times


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Posted

Hello

 

I am a network manager at a school and have an issue where Windows 7 computers will hang at the 'welcome' screen for anything up to 45 minutes to an hour after you have entered your credentials. Rebooting the computer will do nothing, if you log back in the same thing happens. At other times in the day the computer will log in fine.

 

This can happen to 6 or 7 computers in a network room of 30 and to teacher computers in a classroom. All the students/staff use local profiles, the same GPO's and the same software is installed on all. There is no logic to how they can be fine one lesson and then not the next.......it is not the same computers all the time either. This happens across the school in different area's using different switches.

 

Interestingly though I have put 30 new computers into a classroom that frequently had the 'Welcome' screen issue and they have been 100% fine since....not one issue at all. These computers have had the same image put on as the previous one's and i can't find a difference except for the fact they are a different make/model and are newer!

 

If anyone has any idea's i would be very grateful! This issue is not going away and making it very hard......the sheer randomness is making it extremely hard to fault find and every logical route i go down always leads to the fact that it makes no sense at all!!!

 

Thanks very much.

Posted (edited)

Take a look at this thread and make sure you are pushing the hot-fixes described in it (particularly KB2775511 I think).

 

This sped my network logins up drastically after having similar problems to what you are describing.

Edited by midweek
  • Thanks 1
Posted
As above. Often an issue when computers are incorrectly shutdown

 

This is what we've noticed as well. When a student hard restarts a computer at the wall or by holding the power button down it tends to take a while to log in the next time.

Posted

Not going to be a great deal of help but there was a program i used about 6 months ago which monitors the startup and actually lists each process and the time it took.

 

Cant for the life of me remember the name. Will try and find it but there is something out there.

Posted
Not going to be a great deal of help but there was a program i used about 6 months ago which monitors the startup and actually lists each process and the time it took.

 

Could you be thinking of Xperf which comes in the Windows Performance Toolkit? That will analyse all the startup processes. It's a bit tricky to decipher the output as I recall but it did point me in the right direction.

Posted

We have one school with very similar behavior. All of the issues have been on the same make and model of computer, and on the same domain. However, when that same computer on that same domain are at a different school, there will be no reports of logon issues.

 

I currently have about 5 different fixes deployed to random computers to see which ones are actually helping. I'll keep this thread updated.

  • 5 months later...
Posted

I have the same issue at work as desciped in the first post. We have 50 computers and at random times 8 of them run into this "Welcome Screen" issue. After 45-60min of waiting the desktop appears and everything work fine.

Have someone fix this problem?

Posted

Sounds very much like computers incorrectly shutdown to me. We proved the issue to ourselves a few years back by doing the following to a whole IT room:

1) Switch all PCs on and logon and wait however long it takes to get to the desktop on all PCs.

2) Correctly shutdown all PCs - Start > shutdown.

3) Switch all PCs on again and logon. Lookout for long logon times (we found none).

4) Split the room into groups. IN one group, yank out the power cable, the next, switch off at the wall and thirdly hold down the power button until power off, ie 7 seconds.

5) Switch on all PCs and logon. Note that every single PC now takes forever to logon.

 

Then try to tell your users this till you are blue in the face. They won't listen, but try so you know you did your best!

 

Meldrew.

  • Thanks 1
Posted

Sounds like a case of having a good look logon script logging / xperf output - 60 minutes sounds like it's hit a group policy processing timeout - so it should be possible to work out at what stage.

 

Also, have a look at the gpsvc.log files and make sure you are not having the issue or a similar to the one described @ https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2020286

  • Thanks 1
Posted

@Meldres The Pc´s was everytime shutdown normal, this could not be the reason.

 

In the past few weeks I haven´t the time to examine this issue and I help me with a sheduled task which PowerOn the Pc´s over WakeOnLan and Autologon 1 Hour before they get used ;)

One thing drive me mad too, I grap one PC and used Windows Performance Toolkit / xperf but... I restarted this machine over 50 times and everytime it boot fine. The issue isn´t reproducible.

 

All what I can say is, the PC´s aren´t online, a ping to the machines get no response, so no way to get remote on this machine to look what is running. Only one time I was able to get remote to a machine which hung on the Welcome Screen and I find out that under services the Windows Update Service stay at "starting", as the Desktop appears, the service was started.

 

I´ll now take a deeper look with gpsvc loggin.

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