XP SLOW LOGON TO WIN2K SERVER ....PROBLEM SOLVED

[ftoddt]

I have been battling the XP Client Slow Logon to Win2k Server LAN for over 1 1/2 years. My logons would take over 20 minutes for the Logon on average. I had followed almost all of Bill Castner's wonderful FAQ on this subject and his kindness and extra thoughts on the subject were helpful. In his write up, I was not able to do the changing of Nic and hub/switch speeds in that most were unmanaged and too numerous.
So here is the answer. I finally installed XP SP2 and logins are now less than 1 minute. Don't remember Microsoft ever mentioning this as a fix..?? One other get around that some of the clients started using before SP2 was when the computer had most of its waiting time when the "applying user policies", they would unplug the ethernet cable, wait less than a minute and start seeing activity on the desktop and plug it back in. Logons took about 3 minutes.
Anyway, I just wanted to Thank everyone that tried to help me with this. I just wish I knew what SP2 did to change the logon speeds.
Thanks to All,
Todd

 

[bcastner]

I am glad that sorted the issue. I still fear that what you are seeing is how fast the SP2 redirector is compared to the orginal release of XP. As one example, Microsoft used to regularly advise that Netbios name resolution changes could take 30 or more minutes to take effect through the Computer Browser service, but with SP2 this has been reduced to around three minutes on large networks.

What bothers me is that you should not be depending on the redirector at logon. I sincerely hope what you are seeing is that SP2 somehow resolved whatever issue you were experiencing with the connection to the Domain DNS server, the "proper" way to resolve names in a Windows Domain.

Thanks for the report, I am sure it will encourage others who have persistent issues with slow logons to a Domain. I know how annoyed users can get about this issue.