Long Login Times

[Danny11616]

Hi,

 

I have had a quick deep div through the forums to see if anyone else is experiencing this issue but sadly I haven't. WE have roaming profiles at the school but every time a user logs into the computer they are greeted with the Windows sign in animation where it says it is setting everything up.

 

Our biggest problem is that these accounts are taking far too long to login and this is causing some accounts to take 20 minutes during the lesson to sign in which is taking longer than it should. We have gone through deleting the profiles on the users part of the computer which helps out the login times but I wonder if there is anything else that could be causing the roaming profiles a long time to sign in? We have SSD's in our computer so they should be fine in terms of speed and reliability so I am guessing it could be a setting in GPO or something I can do.

[Aprice]

Getting rid of roaming profiles would be my suggestion, and switching to folder redirection.

 

Granted its not a quick 2 second change.

[mavhc]

Roaming profiles are dead, then again, anything that's not 1:1 allocation of laptops is pretty dead.

 

1. Enable "Showed detailed status messages" so you have some clue as to why

[JRA]

Another vote here for binning off roaming profiles. Do you have folder redirection set up at all?

[steveg]

What size are the profiles? Does a user account without a roaming profile login in a reasonable amount of time?

[Norphy]

Another vote here for binning off roaming profiles. Do you have folder redirection set up at all?

 

Folder redirection isn't a magic bullet either, and often can cause more problems than it solves. There was an Adobe package that didn't work properly when %APPDATA% was redirected, for instance. Plus folder redirection is a nuisance if you use laptops and take them off-site. You either need a VPN or *shudder* offline files for the redirected folders to be visible.

 

These days, I think that Known Folder Redirection with OneDrive is the best solution, assuming you have an Office 365 tenant.

[simpsonj]

It might help to have a bit of an understanding of what Windows is doing whilst that animation is playing. As I understand it (and please correct me if I'm wrong) for every new user, Windows will configure every single Windows App for that user (From People, to Xbox Experience and all the other bits that are preinstalled from Windows 10 onwards). As you use Roaming profiles, it will appear that every user is, effectively, a new user, with the added time sync of having to pull down teir profile from the server.

 

Therefore, my advice would be:

 

1, Remove all the pre-existing applications from the Windows image. There's a good script out there that does this. Ideally, you would run this on your base install image, but it could work after the image has been deployed.

 

2, A @Aprice mentioned, don't use roaming profiles, at least, not for students that are using different machines every lesson. Again, on the base install image, you can slim down the local default profile to speed up logins, but even just using the base local profile will likely speed up login times.

 

3, Turn off the animation using a GPO. The animation actually keeps playing after the desktop is ready to use. It'll likely only shave a few seconds of the login time, but every little helps, and no one needs to see that animation every time they login!

[mthomas08]

Hi,

 

I have had a quick deep div through the forums to see if anyone else is experiencing this issue but sadly I haven't. WE have roaming profiles at the school but every time a user logs into the computer they are greeted with the Windows sign in animation where it says it is setting everything up.

 

Our biggest problem is that these accounts are taking far too long to login and this is causing some accounts to take 20 minutes during the lesson to sign in which is taking longer than it should. We have gone through deleting the profiles on the users part of the computer which helps out the login times but I wonder if there is anything else that could be causing the roaming profiles a long time to sign in? We have SSD's in our computer so they should be fine in terms of speed and reliability so I am guessing it could be a setting in GPO or something I can do.

 

I once had this issue many years ago. I rebuilt Group Policy and still couldn't fix it.

 

The issue didn't pop up for some months after a rebuild, so we had to freshly build suites every 4 or so months. The loading screen would sit there until the auto kick out time which I think is between 15-20 minutes. I managed to get the profile size down to about 2MB. Plus I could logon 5 ICT suites (150 machines) in the space of 5-10 seconds with remote software so I knew the profile size wasn't an issue. Originally the time was like 30-60 seconds.

 

Spent months trying to work out what the problem was and never discovered it before I left - I assume the system had a full rebuild (it needed it). The problem with the system at the time, it gone through temp builds and upgrades and multiple different people getting involved and troubleshooting far too often. It really need need a clean one.

 

The first time I built a server I had little to no idea what the hell I was doing but had extreme pressure on my shoulders.

The main server guy left and he really knew his stuff - he left for a little extra money and there was a clear agenda against him (you know that typical story we see often).

The next guy didn't have a clue but clearly kissed the right butt, and left after getting a pay rise and reassuring the head he would stick around.

At this point, the system had gone through a ton of viruses and malware problems and an email server chucking thousands of spam emails daily.

 

The new guy knew his stuff and luckily the head listened to him about server expenditure. Still took an age to get things better but at no stage did we get to do a fresh wipe of the system. It was always recovery work. Ugh.. I do actually miss those days.

Edited October 2, 2024 by mthomas08

[Olliedawg]

Is it affecting a single user, or every user? Specific machine, or any machine?

 

Turn on verbose login messages to see what it is hanging on. could be a group policy, could be a problem with the image, this should give you a starting point

 

Roaming profiles - i'd look to move away from these - we use local profiles now & they're spot on. First time login takes less than a minute, subsequent logins take ~30 seconds

[Danny11616]

Ok, I will most likely look into local profiles later on in the future. As for the GPO @simpsonj what would I need to look at in terms of disabling the animation? This is something I would like to look into to possibly doing first to try and tick this box first.

[simpsonj]

Computer Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> System -> Logon;

Open the option Show first sign-in animation and change it to Disabled

[Danny11616]

Thank you for this. I will test this out today and hopefully I have a good fix for the time being.

[icttech1981]

One thing we do here is assign a laptop number to each child in a class. Each week they get the same number, this helps massively with logon times as the profile is already on the machine. We have SSD machines and from pressing the power on button to getting logged in is always under 1 minute.

 

Obviously there may be times when a machine is not available so a child has to use a different laptop but this rarely causes a big issue.

[maxschmidt]

Hi,

 

You should try again by reviewing the Event Viewer on the computers experiencing slow logins. Look for errors or warnings related to profile loading, which might indicate underlying issues.

 

Thanks

[2097]

We also had to move to Local profiles from Roaming .

 

Things to look for with Roaming are not just folder size , but the number of files .

 

Some profiles had only a 200mB size , but around 30k files .

 

Moving to Local's is the best option , Maybe though putting kids on Mandatorys is also a good option!