Slow Windows 7 Logoffs - Waiting for the User Profile Service

[adhutton]

We are experiencing a slow logoff problem with some users on our Windows 7 PCs.

 

When a user logs off their logoff 'hangs' and takes ages to complete (if it ever does).

 

The user logoff seems to stall at the Waiting for the User Profile Service message and often requires a hard reboot of the PC to get out of the loop!

 

Anyone seen this problem/found a fix please?

 

Cheers - Andrew

[adhutton]

Bump - can anyone help please?

 

Andrew

[Ergo]

Andrew,

Have you been through the event logs on these machines to see if it shows anything (permission denied/no response from.../etc) during the time the machine is showing that status on screen?

Is this happening for all users, or just some particular users? I am assuming that you are using roaming profiles and this could be waiting to upload large files on the users' desktop.

Is your network single site? I ask because I have seen issues in multi-site resulting in workstations trying to upload profiles to a remote file server rather than the local.

 

There are a fairly large number of possible causes to this so more information on your network would be useful such as OS version for client/server, what you have tried to identify/rule out causes, etc.

 

Regards,

David Irwin

[adhutton]

Thanks for your reply David.

 

I have been through the event logs and the only common message on the affected machines appears to be "The Winlogon notification subscriber is taking a long time to handle the notification event (logoff)"

 

The problem seems quite random and when the user logs off they get to the "Waiting for the User Profile service" screen or just the "Logging off" screen and then it just hangs for ages, often requiring a hard reboot of the PC.

 

We do use roaming profiles and normally this doesn't cause us any issues. We are a single site.

 

Our servers are Windows 2008R2 with Win 7 Pro desktops.

 

This problem has just started since the Summer holidays. During the summer we virtualised some old file servers and moved many of the user work areas onto Windows 2008R2 virtual file servers which are connected via iSCSI to a QNAP NAS box. Not sure if that has had any effect?

 

I have checked all of the user folder permissions etc. and everything looks ok and as I have mentioned, the problem seems quite random and isn't affecting everyone!

 

Any help/suggestions greatly appreciated.

 

Cheers - Andrew

Edited September 18, 2012 by adhutton

[Ergo]

Andrew,

A few suggestions which may or may not be related to the problem.

With Windows 2008 servers and Win7 clients I always recommend file servers have the following installed and enabled:

Remote Differential Compression

Search Service

Ensure with the Search Service you have been through and enabled indexing of the data drives. Both of these can improve performance of Win7 clients.

 

To address your specific issue I try to identify a specific event when the problem occurs and investigate thoroughly - I have seen issues where the local profile for a particular user was well within normal size limits generally, but on one particular machine they had saved a large file in their downloads folder which caused a similar problem.

 

Other issues which can cause this type of problem are:

Incorrect IP address (A Record) entries in DNS for File Servers

Incorrect IP address (A Record) entries in DNS for Domain Controllers (particularly old or orphaned servers!)

Network problems between client and file server (such as high CRC error rates on particular links, or link saturation on a shared up-link)

Incorrect DNS server addresses allocated to client machine (most likely when client has fixed IP address or reservation in DHCP)

If you are using DFS for profiles ensure the DFS root does not reference old (or inaccessible) replica servers

I hope some of the above is helpful for you in identifying the problems - slow logons and logoffs are one of the things users notice most, and even if all other aspects of their experience are good will result in complaints about "slow" computers!

 

Regards

 

David Irwin

[mulderite]

Andrew,

 

Did you ever get to the bottom of this? We are starting to see exactly the same issue on a small number of workstations. I could literally cut-and-paste your original post and it would apply to our issue.

[adhutton]

Andrew,

 

Did you ever get to the bottom of this? We are starting to see exactly the same issue on a small number of workstations. I could literally cut-and-paste your original post and it would apply to our issue.

 

We tried several things to fix this, but the one which seemed to do the trick here was to disable the autotuning in Windows 7.

 

We run this command in a PC startup script on all machines in it seems to work well:

 

netsh interface tcp set global autotuning=disabled

 

Hope this helps?

 

Andrew

Edited May 21, 2013 by adhutton

[mulderite]

Thanks for the info Andrew. Unfortunately for us, that particular command didnt do the trick. However, we've since discovered that it was the Windows Search Indexing service that was stalling logoffs. Disabling the service on the affected workstation fixed this issue.

[adhutton]

Glad you got it fixed

 

Andrew