Installed Vista on this machine months ago, initially had this same problem and it went away after a few reboots. But i recently had to format/reload Vista because of a different issue. The long login time has not gone away on this fresh install. I believe it is not affected when i take it out of the domain (2003). After searching the internet I have tried: NETSH INTERFACE TCP GLOBAL set autotuninglevel=disabled and also making sure i can connect to \\domain.local\sysvol\. Neither of those helped. I plan on using msconfig.exe next and disabling everything at startup to see if the issue goes away. Event logs are below: Log Name: ApplicationSource: Microsoft-Windows-WinlogonDate: 2/18/2008 11:02:25 AMEvent ID: 6005Task Category: NoneLevel: WarningKeywords: ClassicUser: N/AComputer: computaDescription:The winlogon notification subscriber <GPClient> is taking long time to handle the notification event (StartShell).Event Xml:<Event xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/win/2004/08/events/event"> <System> <Provider Name="Microsoft-Windows-Winlogon" Guid="{DBE9B383-7CF3-4331-91CC-A3CB16A3B538}" EventSourceName="Wlclntfy" /> <EventID Qualifiers="32768">6005</EventID> <Version>0</Version> <Level>3</Level> <Task>0</Task> <Opcode>0</Opcode> <Keywords>0x80000000000000</Keywords> <TimeCreated SystemTime="2008-02-18T16:02:25.000Z" /> <EventRecordID>2348</EventRecordID> <Correlation /> <Execution ProcessID="0" ThreadID="0" /> <Channel>Application</Channel> <Computer>tbdivb20008v.corp.local</Computer> <Security /> </System> <EventData> <Data>GPClient</Data> <Data>StartShell</Data> <Binary>C807D200</Binary> </EventData></Event> Log Name: ApplicationSource: Microsoft-Windows-WinlogonDate: 2/18/2008 11:11:24 AMEvent ID: 6006Task Category: NoneLevel: WarningKeywords: ClassicUser: N/AComputer: computa Description:The winlogon notification subscriber <GPClient> took 600 second(s) to handle the notification event (StartShell).Event Xml:<Event xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/win/2004/08/events/event"> <System> <Provider Name="Microsoft-Windows-Winlogon" Guid="{DBE9B383-7CF3-4331-91CC-A3CB16A3B538}" EventSourceName="Wlclntfy" /> <EventID Qualifiers="32768">6006</EventID> <Version>0</Version> <Level>3</Level> <Task>0</Task> <Opcode>0</Opcode> <Keywords>0x80000000000000</Keywords> <TimeCreated SystemTime="2008-02-18T16:11:24.000Z" /> <EventRecordID>2354</EventRecordID> <Correlation /> <Execution ProcessID="0" ThreadID="0" /> <Channel>Application</Channel> <Computer>tbdivb20008v.corp.local</Computer> <Security /> </System> <EventData> <Data>GPClient</Data> <Data>600</Data> <Data>StartShell</Data> <Binary>04000000</Binary> </EventData></Event> Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Hi Matt555, I would like to confirm if there are some logon scripts applied to this machine and the policy Run logon scripts synchronously is enabled. If so, please temporarily disable the policy or remove the logon scripts to check the result. Hope it helps. Sincerely, Joson Zhou Microsoft Online Community Support

Hi Joson, I will look for that policy setting and see if its enabled. If you see this before i respond can u tell me where it is in Group Policies? Thanks! Matt

I ran a gpresult /Z and found: GPO: DivisonEveryone KeyName: Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System\RunLogonScriptSync Value: 1, 0, 0, 0 State: Enabled I will need to get creative to test with only changing this option due to it being linked and enforced at the domain level. Will let you know of my results.

Hi Matt555, Here is the location of that policy: User Configuration\ Administrative Templates\ System\ Scripts Hope it helps. Sincerely, Joson Zhou Microsoft Online Community Support

Hello I am afraid the issue in wider than just disabling that policy User Configuration\ Administrative Templates\ System\ Scripts , this problem has been there since the beginning, I have managed the reduce the login time to 3 minutes or more using the group policy and disabling Wait for network at start up and logon and few other settings, but like Matt555, I have tried everything including disabling TCPtuning, but the problem is still there. This may be to do with windows server 2003 and domain controller. All I know is that I have tried everything including blocking all polices to user and the computer and it has NOT made a difference. On top of this- the users profile also get corrupted, shrinking ntuser.dat file to 256 kb at log off- so the next time user logs on- it says the group policy client service has failed the logon. Access is Denied . This is not exclusive to the domain environment as I have read about stand alone machine with a same issue. So far.. Microsoft has largely ignored these two important issues even though i emailed the Vista development team and few others Microsoft people in uk. Do you know how annoying is for users to wait such a long time to be logged on and then their profile be corrupted after that? And as the domain administrator, all you hear is moaning from your users. Fixing this would be really great- any help is much appreciated. Shaggy

Hi Shaggy, I would like to know what is the exact time when the Windows Vista machine hangs during startup. Before or after the logon screen appears? What about booting into Safe Mode with Networking? Can the issue be resolved? As the nature limitation in forum, please understand that it may take a lot of time to analyze/resolve such tough issue. Thus, you might contact our Customer Service Support (CSS) for instant assistance, if the issue is urgent. To obtain the phone numbers for specific technology request, please check the website listed below:http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=fh;EN-US;PHONENUMBERS Absolutely, you are welcomed if you would like to discuss the issue in this forum. I will do my best to help you. Sincerely, Joson Zhou Microsoft Online Community Support

Hi Joson the logon screen apears fast- not much delay on there. but it is the login that is the problem. I will try the safe mode with networking and get back to you. I also tried service pack 1 yesterday, but it did not resolve this issue. thanks for your help. Shaggy

Hello Again OK- I think I found the answer I found this is happening ONLY on certain hardware. On a different hardware platform, my test login was between 45 sec to 1 min, this is ok for a domain environment with lots of group policies. However, when i looked at the network driver, i found that the driver belongs to Microsoft, I updated the NIC driver from Intel and Broadcom (NEW Version), and the login is back to NORMAL at last, i have to say that i only did this for few machines and tested with one test account, But i am 90 percent sure that the long login issue is because vista is using its own driver for your NIC and that is where the problem is coming frrom. MAtt555 , Try these, update your drivers formvendor to the latest and if it worked please let me know so we can make sure this has been resolved. I will install it on few other machine and chek the result Shaggy

Bad news,,,, the new driver does not solve the problem completely, but it improves login timeShaggy

i think there are too many reasons for the loggin time delay, i check my clients and DCs, non of them had this update installed. just released it with wsus, will tell you the result soon. Shaggy

I was finally able to test this and it solved my problem! Though it still does not make complete sense because i have another vista machine that is getting the same policy applied to it with no login problems... odd.

Hi Matt what did you test that solved the issue? what policy was that? Shaggy

mr-shaggy wrote: Hi Matt what did you test that solved the issue? what policy was that? Shaggy Sorry i meant to quote the post below: Joson Zhou - MSFT wrote: Hi Matt555, I would like to confirm if there are some logon scripts applied to this machine and the policy Run logon scripts synchronously is enabled. If so, please temporarily disable the policy or remove the logon scripts to check the result. Hope it helps. Sincerely, Joson Zhou Microsoft Online Community Support

Two things: The GPO settings can be placed on the computer or the user. The computer setting takes precedence over the user setting. Turning off this setting does not "solve" the problem. The problem is not that the logon scripts are busy for 10 minutes. Something about the processing done by GPClient makes GPClient loop for 10 minutes and then record a message stating same as it brings up the desktop. So this GPO setting, as well as some of the other "solutions" posted all over the internet, are just trigger points for the problem affecting a lot of Vista seats. What is MS doing to determine the underlying root cause? I ask because some secure environments require the synchronous setting so this band-aid to the problem is not usable. I can't even try this solution on a production seat, since the seat would be out of policy and blocked on the network and the problem only occurs when connected to the network. I have seats with the 10 minute delay. We have successfully rebuilt the user's profile (very painful) and the problem goes away for a week to two weeks. Then it comes back. Once the problem hits, it is constant every time the seat boots on the network. How do we look into this further and possibly get to true root cause? Thanks!

We too require this GPO setting. Luckily this is only my test machine! Our solution is to simply not deploy vista. It provides no benefit to our users and introduces a ton of problems.

I'd have to agree...this is not a logon script problem. My problem is the same except for mine is always about 2 minutes 15 seconds. However, mine happens before login so I know it's not a script thing. Mine sits on the Vista "Please Wait" for the 2:15 before it even gets to the logon. Once I enter my credentials it takes another 45 seconds after that. I have yet to find a solution to this....and it's very annoying.

I'd like to remind everybody that the reasons for slow logon may be not so sophisticated. In my case the situation looked very similar. A user had a 10-minuted delay before every logon. Other users logged on just fine on the same machine. I've tried to re-create the profile, to update network drivers etc. The only thing I foundis that it wasdue toSynchronous Application of Group Policy. But it is not accepatble for us to turn it off. So I continued to look for the real 'root cause'.The actual reason was very trivial and not related to hardware at all. We have some logon scripts for mapping network drives for different users. And in this particular case the user did not have the permissions required to connect to the network share. So the script hang for exactly 10 munutes, which is the default time-out.Hope this helps anybody.

I am having a similar issue with Vista Business on a Win 2003 environment. If I log into the machine locally, i dont have any issues. If i log into the machine with out the network cable pluggedin (cached domain credentials) then the device logs in fine with no delays. As soon as I log into the machine with the network cable plugged in and the domain selected it takes at least 5 minutes before i can even see the desktop. I've reloaded the machine just incase it was software conflicts. There is no extra software install that might be causing the conflicts. Event logs are useless because there are no error messages that might pertain to why this is happening. **EDIT** I am having the 6005 and 6006 error messages.

Check your Group Policies. See if you have any printers added in the Control Panel Settings (User Configuration=>Preferences=>Control Panel Settings=>Printers). If so, try removing them or change the option under Common to "Run in logged-on user's security context".

I would just like to note that I had this exact problem. Windows would stay on the "Welcome" screen for several minutes and the only errors I could see were Events 6005 and 6006. I was able to resolve this by disabling the GPO in my domain that contained the Group Policy Preferences for printers. After that, log in times returned to normal.

I found a resolution for my problem. It seems that the hang up was because of the install process of network printers for the PC. we have a script that runs and installs a printers based on groups in AD. The issue was that Win 2k3 didnt have Vista drivers for these printers and Vista of course hung up during login process. I was unable to allow access to these drivers because Vista wouldnt display the warning messages during the login. Resolution was to manually add these printers and remove the user from the groups that were scripted to setup printers.

Hi I am having the same problem. I have deployed client side prefernces on all machines in the domain. the DC also has them. howver since rolling out these preferences - most machines just hang at log off - or take along time to logon. I am going to try "Run in logged-on user's security context" but cant see how that will help. I have the vista printer drivers installed on the 2003 print server and I am using user preferences and adding a shared printer. any more advice ?

"Run in logged-on user's security context" didnt make any difference. same error messages. in the end I have given up and I am reverting to my printer scripts. it looks like this doesnt want to work for me with 1 2003 print server / DC and 1 2008 DC. :( annoying if anyone has any suggestions please reply :)

You might want to look at the group you are using to deply the GPO- I ahve no idea why it worked, but we were having 5-10 minute logon delays on all XP pro machines after last week's windows updates came down. I was messing with the permissions to make it easier to test, and noticed that as soon as I didn't use the "authenticated users" group to deploy it, it worked. I am now using 'autheticated users' with no issues.

Hey NormanV, Have you had any success in resolving this issue. The "solutions" that I have seen as well do not 'fix' this issue in our environment. Has anyone noticed this with multiple user profiles on the same machine, or is it normally only a single user that is having problems on the machine?Ian

I too am having the problems but only on Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7. We upgraded a workstation running Windows Server 2008 to 2008 R2 and started having this exact problem. Then we installed a brand new Windows 7 Ultimate on another machine and it too started having the problem. It only happens if you are connected to the network, if working offsite no issues. For us it's Event ID 6005 and 6005 .. 6006 states: "The winlogon notification subscriber <GPClient> took 232 second(s) to handle the notification event (Logon)." Environment: This site: Two servers, Win2k3 and Win2k8 both AD, win2k8 is GC Other site: One win2k3 AD/GC No one else is experiencing the issue.. Windows Vista clients logging in with no issues. Should I post a gpresult /z from the Win7 machine?

Has any solution been forthcoming re this problem? Suddenly I am exeriencing exactly the same issue and none of the above suggestions have made any difference.Machine: Vista Business SP2 32bitSecurity: Norton 2010DC/AD: SBS 2003 R2Events: 6005 and 6006 following login.The only time the machine starts normally is if the LAN is disconnected!

Hi Ziggy.I know this is an old post but I'm having this issue with a single user on a single machine.The users profile has been deleted and recreated and the problem persists. The affected user can log on to other machines in the same subnet in the same AD OU without any delay but on her specific machine the delay is an unacceptable 3599seconds (1 hour).Your post hinted at a similar circumstance.I've managed to logon to the affected desktop (a Shuttle barebones machine) without any delay and a few other standard user accounts plus my test account are unaffected.I can start in safe mode without issues and have disabled all but the essential startup services agains without error. I haven't bothered to narrow the services down one by one because I'm sure this is somehow user related.Any new info on this problem would be greatly appreciated.N03L.

Hi NoelWalshThere has been few things that we have attributed and found are attributing to the extended logon times. Now a 1 hour delay was certainly beyond anything that we had experienced but it could be related. Have you recreated either the machine object or user account in AD? When the user does finally get logged in is everything functioning without issue?One step that we did notice to have a pretty signficant impact on the logon was turning off logging of group policy on the users logon. This was a attributing at times to extending logons by up to 2 minutes while it was trying to process RSOP.In other circumstances it was bad drivers that looked to be contributing to the extended logon times. I have recently began to work further with Xperf and have been able to 'sniff' a bad driver by analyzing the times they are taking to load. The Xperf logs are extensive but they do give you a fairly detailed analysis of many different components and their loading times. Install Xperf and you can run the tracesxbootmgr -trace boot -numRuns 1 -resultPath ***PATH FOR LOG FILE*** -PrepSystem -traceFlags baseit will reboot, log in with the bad account, then a UAC for elevated priviledge, it will likely reboot again and repeat... Once it has completed then run this xperf -i ***PATH TO LOG FILE***.etl -o ***PATH TO LOG FILE*** summary.xml -a bootThat will exact the etl file to an xml that isn't too bad to analyze. The process does take a while though.Good luck, I know first hand how difficult it can be dig out these user specific issues in vista.

I just wanted to chime in with my results because I've been working on a similar problem. In my case, this problem (10 minutes logon with Errors 6005 and 6006 logged) was happening on users logging onto a Windows Server 2008 Terminal Server, using RemoteApp. They would get stuck at a blue page (empty desktop) in the "Details" sub-frame of the Remote Desktop logon box. As others have pointed out the possible link with logon scripts, here's what I did to locate the problem and fix it: I logged as a local admin (not domain) on the 2008 server. I opened a file explorer and went directly to my DC's netlogon folder where logon scripts are, using one of the user's credentials. \\someserver\netlogon I ran each script that is being pushed by a GPO to the users. One is for file shares mapping, another for printers mapping. File shares went fine, but printers opened a window asking me (the admin) if I really wanted to install the necessary drivers for this printer. I clicked yes. Then another printer, clicked yes. Voilà.

Hello, After the logging in as a domain user on Vista Business 32 machines, I only get to the blank screen. The mouse cursor is visible and movable; task manager does not show up or function. This event only happens after any domain user logs in; local users does not have this problem. Any suggestions? Thanks.

I just wanted to chime in with my results because I've been working on a similar problem. In my case, this problem (10 minutes logon with Errors 6005 and 6006 logged) was happening on users logging onto a Windows Server 2008 Terminal Server, using RemoteApp. They would get stuck at a blue page (empty desktop) in the "Details" sub-frame of the Remote Desktop logon box. As others have pointed out the possible link with logon scripts, here's what I did to locate the problem and fix it: I logged as a local admin (not domain) on the 2008 server. I opened a file explorer and went directly to my DC's netlogon folder where logon scripts are, using one of the user's credentials. \\someserver\netlogon I ran each script that is being pushed by a GPO to the users. One is for file shares mapping, another for printers mapping. File shares went fine, but printers opened a window asking me (the admin) if I really wanted to install the necessary drivers for this printer. I clicked yes. Then another printer, clicked yes. Voilà. Hi! We have the exact same issue (Windows 2008 Domain with 2008 Terminal Servers). Unfortunately a user cannot see that "printer driver" popup during the logon process, but there is a GPO called "Point and Print Restrictions" which can prevent that popups: Computer Configuration -> Policies -> Administrative Tools -> Printers or User configuration -> Policies -> Administrative Tools -> Control Panel -> Printers After configuring that GPO the logon process was much faster and the event logs 6005 and 6006 disappeared. Regards SvenO

Just wanted to hop in and give you a big "thank you". I've been searching for quite some time trying to figure out why the long hold-up for Windows 7 users and this seems to be it. Went from a 10 minute wait to less than a minute. Something so simple causing so much of a headache.

I had the same issue when i deployed printing preferences via group policy. I also has issues with hanging when the user logged out and only happended on VIsta machines- XP and WIn7 worked fine. Removing the printer preferences from the GPO fixed it for me. When I manually install the printers from the share on the server they work fine, its only when i use group policy preferences that it has issues ....which is a darn shame as it makes life much easier but if it causes this sort of issue I can use it.

Thanks. This helped me. I'm logging into a Win 2003 DC from a Win 2008 R2 client.

We no longer have logon scripts. The were discontinued with the advent of Group Policy Preferences. For those of us still using logon scripts, I highly recommend replacing them with GP Preferences, utilizing the registry key section (even hkey_current_user), mapped drives, shortcuts, and printer deployment. If you have something that cannot be done with preferences, I'd love to know what. We have XP and 7 computers but skipped Vista. Our logon time from a cold boot to being able to see the start menu after logon is about 1min 20 seconds on HP 6005 model computers (Dual core Athelon II with 4GB memory) running windows 7 32bit. This includes 2 mapped drives, and 3 printers all set to "replace" in group policy. This is also with no existing profile for the particular user in question. This is true in my building (where we have a local on site domain controller). For our other schools, we have a minimum of a 100Mbps fiber connection to our SAN which has all our virtual servers. In these schools, logon times are from 2 minutes to 8 minutes and it's hard for me to track down why. Even in my building, the mapped drives and the print servers are all virtual on this SAN, only the domain controller is local. The log says that the gpclient is taking about 70 seconds which isn't horrible but I wish there was a progress bar instead of the endless circling icon. With windows 7 you must specific the policy mentioned above that disabled the need to "authenticate" your print servers. We've also found that you must turn on GP loopback if you plan on deploying printers based on computer OU's rather than users. computer->policies->admin templates->printers->Point and Print Restrictions->Disabled computer->Policies->system->group policy->user group policy loopback processing mode -> Enabled (Merge) DON'T FORGET MERGE I don't know why it's not a computer setting to begin with since we want a user to have printers close by no matter which computer they use. It seems like there would be very few circumstances where you'd want to deploy a printer to a user no matter where they were in the organization. I will explore this delayed start on services to see if we have some agents that slowing down the computers. Our server team has used wireshark (free network sniffer) to see how long different things are taking network wise, but I really wish there was a way to tell what it's currently waiting for during the logon process. One last thing, we do have “wait for the network at computer startup and logon” set to enabled or else users without profiles will not get mapped drives or printers. This certainly slows down the logon process but is required for consistency. I wish we could have it do everything else and have it complete these tasks after logon (cause I know it can) rather than having everything wait. Many thx for this proposal Mike and also Laurent, I had this annoying issue at a customer site where I deployed a Win2008 R2 Sp1 RDS Server last week, initially no problems at all, but today several users had that annoying 2min delay with "Blue Window". All I had to do was to set this on the logonscript GPO which maps the printers. computer->policies->admin templates->printers->Point and Print Restrictions->Disabled And voilá, instant access to the desktop almost :) Thx /Tony

This was the solution for me - 2 vista PCs on the domain were taking 1hr+ after logon - showing only welcome screen. Event viewer gave a number of GP events incl. Event ID 6005. Had already totally wiped one PC and upgraded to Win7 to get around this - but tried just uninstalling the update on the 2nd one... that did the trick!!! THANKS SO MUCH