Benchmarking user login?

[Callum]

Lately a few specific workstations have suddenly decided that every time they login they will take (literally) 10 minutes longer than every other machine to get to the desktop. They seem to get stuck mainly on the black screen that appears before the "Applying personal settings" window (at the top-left) appears. Imaging the workstations using SCCM fixes the issue, but more and more workstations are coming up with the issue. Can anybody recommend any form of software we can use to see exactly what the machines are doing for 10 minutes?

[ZeroHour]

The event log usually has quite a few clues as to what is going on also you can enable debugging mode using a GPO setting I recall but I cant remember where.

Do you have verbose login messages turned on?

[Quackers]

You need the Windows Performance Toolkit (Its available for Windows 7 too although the link is for Windows 8/8.1)

 

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/hh162945.aspx

 

There was a trace tool in that kit we used when we had 1 suite of PC's talking 10 minutes to login it showed us a graph with each process and how long it was talking to run.

[Arthur]

The follow link contains several articles on how to use the Windows Performance Toolkit.

 

Windows Enterprise Client Boot and Logon Optimization - TechNet Blogs

[chrisbradbury]

The black screen before Applying Preferences is when the PC applies active setup settings.

 

Logins for us used to take 4-5 minutes but after we removed all the active setups from the PC's registry it reduced to <30 seconds.

 

HKLM\software\microsoft\Active Setup\Installed Components\ (if I recall) in the registry. Change the StubPaths to blank.