Laggy logons (aka “The Wait”)

Another day, another old call to try to get caught up on.

User called last week…maybe the week before…stating that it was taking a minute and 15 seconds to get logged on.  This was the time he measured from the time he put in his network password and clicked ok, before the desktop would finally begin to appear.  During that 1:15 of unbearable waiting, all he would see is a dialog box showing “Loading user profile”.  This particular computer is shared by two people in the office, and according to the one who called in the trouble call, the other guy was having the same exact problem.

I should point out that the majority of our systems are running WindowsXP Service Pack 2, Office Professional 2003 Service Pack 2 and some flavor of Symantec Antivirus in the 10.x family.  This system was right in line with that standard.

Knowing that I had been having problems trying to push updates to that system, I figured the first place to start would be to update the network drivers.  The only problem was…the network drivers were already the most current (even if they are three years old).  But what the heck.  I logged on with a local admin account (most of our users are in the Power Users local group, not Administrators),  downloaded a new copy of the latest, deleted the adapter from the Device Manager, rebooted, then pointed Windows to the folder of drivers I had downloaded.  Had the original user log on – and it still took over a minute.

Realized at this point though that the local account I used to log on did NOT have the same lag time during log on – log on was fairly immediate.

Took a look around the Event Logs, and noticed that Symantec Antivirus (the software that everyone seems to love to hate nearly as much as Microsoft) was having some issues at start up, so I ended up removing the slightly older version that was on the system and installing the latest SAV.  We haven’t moved to Symantec Endpoint Protection (SEP) yet, and as things stand right now, perhaps we won’t, but that is a different story.  Suffice it to say, that didn’t help with the logon problem.

Grasping at useless straws, I did a quick defrag of the hard drive, which someone else must have done recently.  The 80 GB drive in the system only took about 20 minutes to run through the entire defrag.  Once again, the problem was not resolved.

I decided to log on with my network account, and low and behold, I get logged in immediately.  No minute plus wait before I got to the Desktop.

Now it is looking more and more to be profile specific.  The only problem was the user’s insistence that the other guy who uses the workstation is having the same problem.  Easy enough to find out – and it turns out the other guy was NOT having problems getting logged on.  He managed to download and install a Freeze.com screensaver and wallpaper application, which I really wish he had not done, but that wasn’t what I was there for.

Back to the original guy, and I see a print queue to a non-exisitent server that we remove.  I check for drive mappings to non-existent servers, but there aren’t any.  Another log off/log on, and still the wait.

Somehow I get this wild idea that maybe it is the actual Desktop itself that is the problem.  So I take what I think is going to be a quick look at the Display Properties….and I wait…and wait…and wait…before the dialog box finally comes up.  And that plain blue screen that I think is the “None” wallpaper is in fact – Internet Explorer Wallpaper?  Now THAT is strange.  So I change the Wallpaper to “None”, log him off, and 15 seconds later, he is logged back on and at the Desktop.

Broken wallpaper causes excessive logon time.

Whodathunkit?