I installed W7 RC Build 7100 at home, then later I joined it at our domain at work. Everything is fine and dandy. I didnt experience any problem whatsoever there. But when I returned home, I tried to use my domain user account, it logs in but hangs. I have no icons in the desktop, I cant click on the Start Orb to at least restart my laptop properly, but I can move the mouse. At first I thought maybe I just have to wait for it to initialize whatever it needs to initialize (if it needs to initialize anything at all - LOL), but after watching Angels and Demons at the cinemas (which is good 2 plus hour movie) I came back and see my laptop to be at where I left it - hangs at the desktop. I tried several times doing what Im trying to do here, and I get random results: I can login sometimes and it just hangs on my desktop or I just get a BLACK SCREEN OF DEATH! I login and see nothing! So what I did was, I tried to login from my local administrator account, then logoff from there, then use my domain account and it worked! So the problem is I cant use my domain user account DIRECTLY FROM BOOT. I had to login to my local administrator account first then logoff then I can use my domain user account. This has never been a problem in XP or Vista. Why is it happening to 7 now? Any ideas?

What a mess. First, unless you have a VPN connection to your domain, then you probably are logging in with a cached domain account. Just why it works the second time around probably has to do with who authenticates first. Good job on figuring it out.Second, you should probably not have a test OS (win 7) join your production domain. If I were your domain admin, that would be a bad thing. But, if you could even do that, I guess you are either an admin or your admin does not run a very tight ship.Finally, W7 has enough problems in networking without adding domain stuff to the list. I don't have many insights because our domain admins would shoot me if I tried to put this thing on the network. For now, and until they issue some fixes to the masses of networking problems they already have, I would just stick to workgroup membership.

mdpido: Have you tried multiple times and confirmed that you have to log in as local administrator first before logging in on your domain account? -Nick

As this is a Release Candidate, I don't see any reason to use it in any production environment. Does your error log have anything on the issue? What if you boot up to the admin account?