If you ever experience slow network logon times, here are a couple of things to look for.

  • Check the size of the users roaming profiles. If they are saving files to the desktop instead of to their My Documents folder or a network drive, this will increase the size of the users profile. Each time a user logons onto a system the profile needs to load from the network, or from the cache on the local machine with a roaming profile sync. This can really slow down the logon, especially of a policy is set to flush the profile on log off – this is the typical setting on terminal services servers.
  • Check the login scripts that are running when a user logs on. If a script is hanging it will cause a logon time of about ten minutes, as the default timeout for logon scripts is tem minutes.There is a policy where you can change the script timeout using the Group Policy Editor and looking in Admin Templates\System\Scripts. Try running the script again from the command prompt once a user is logged in to see where it hangs and troubleshoot from there.
  • Automatically connecting network printers via the script may also cause slow logon times. If the drivers are not installed on the machine, Vista will prompt in the background for authorization to install the printer drivers. Since the are prompts are in the background, the user won’t see them and the scripts will hang.
  • Make sure that there is an available Domain Controller the machine can reach for network authentication. If there are a lot of users that are trying to logon at the same time over a slow WAN link, this could cause slow logons.