Mixed XP windows 7 domain login times on windows 7 exceeding 30 seconds

[MaXiM]

Hi, I'm having a problem on my 2003 based domain. I have both XP and W7 computers working together. Up until about a week ago the windows 7 PC's were logging in at about 20 seconds which was perfectly acceptable.

 

But now logging in is taking 30 - 40 seconds.. I can't seem to figure out why as nothing has changed really.

 

Users have roaming profiles and application data redirection. I tried removing the users profile and app data but doesn't seem to make any difference. It will recreate the profile and then logging in is still at about 30 - 40 seconds.

 

I have cached profiles enabled as I assumed that would speed things up... like I said before a week ago it was just fine..

 

It's not anything with the solid colour on the desktop because I use a jpeg background.

 

I'm running out of ideas really, not sure what it could be.

 

Just to say I'm all for moving from XP to Windows 7 but sometimes I wish Windows 7 would at least tease you with a desktop while logging in like XP did.. At least it showed something was happening instead of staring at a welcome screen.

 

I also checked the eventvwr and its clean across the board..

 

Any help would be appreciated greatly

Edited June 1, 2011 by MaXiM

[MaXiM]

Ok well I've made some progress after a whole morning tweaking. I now know it's Sophos Anti Virus that is the cause but I'm not sure what I can do to fix it though because I need to have sophos installed on all the clients.

[Duke5A]

To get Win7 to give some verbosity to login events try enabling Verbose vs normal status messages in GPO. It can be found under Computer>Policies>Administrative Templates>System.

 

Also, I found it to be easier to maintain two separate computer policies for Win2k/XP and Vista/7. You don't need to separate machines into different organization units either. You can create WMI filters in AD and apply them to the policies so the 2k/XP policy doesn't get applied to Vista/7 clients and visa versa.

[MaXiM]

Ok, I've managed to solve my problem. After tweaking in Sophos Enterprise I found some options to ignore scanning *.ntuser and remote scanning files.

I applied this to the windows 7 machines and now they are doing 24 second logins on cold boot which is fine by me considering they are in a mixed XP environment with loopback policies etc.

 

Hope this might help others with the similar issues.

[MaXiM]

Also, I found it to be easier to maintain two separate computer policies for Win2k/XP and Vista/7. You don't need to separate machines into different organization units either. You can create WMI filters in AD and apply them to the policies so the 2k/XP policy doesn't get applied to Vista/7 clients and visa versa.

 

I use loop back in merge which seems to work. i have an ou for my windows 7 computers with the W7 GPO in there which does the loopback (to apply themes and a couple of other diff settings).

 

The WMI idea sounds interesting, haven't tried that before but I have read about it so I might look into it, thanks.