How to Speed up the Login Process for Domain Workstations

You may experience extremely long delays when logging into Windows domains using Windows XP Pro.

This is caused by the asyncronous loading of networking during the boot up process.

This actually speeds up the login process in a stand-alone workstation (by allowing the user to log in with cached logon credentials before the network is fully ready).

To disable this feature which only benefits stand alone workstations do the following:

• Open the MMC and add the group policy snap-in.

• Under:

  • Computer Configuration

  • Administrative Templates

  • System

  • Logon

• change "Always wait for the network at computer startup and logon" to ENABLED.
  

This should restore your domain workstation logons to their normal speed.

This can be distributed to clients using the group policy from a Windows 2000 server by upgrading the standard policy template with the XP policy template. Since this is an XP only command, non-XP systems will ignore it in a domain distributed group policy.

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Last Modified: 11/03/2008