Working offline on laptop - slow logon

I hope this is posted in somewhat right place.

I work at a University College. We have Windows XP clients, Windows 2003
servers and use AD. Many users has laptops, and wish to work offline (at home
and on travels). We let them log on to their laptops offline with AD's cached
credentials, and a copy/cache of the server profile locally.

They have roaming profiles, redirected My documents etc, and I have enabled
Offline files (otherwise they get an error message regarding no rights to
their "My Documents, Desktop etc).

We have given up on using Offline Files for synchronising so far (too many
unknown factors). We let them use MS SyncToy, for now.

So, my question:
Why is the local logon so slooow (2 min vs 10 sec) when their wireless
network is enabled, and otherwise not ?

I appreciate any help.

On Apr 24, 4:22 am, Mary <M... DeleteThis @discussions.microsoft.com> wrote:
> I hope this is posted in somewhat right place.
>
> I work at a University College. We have Windows XP clients, Windows 2003
> servers and use AD. Many users has laptops, and wish to work offline (at home
> and on travels). We let them log on to their laptops offline with AD's cached
> credentials, and a copy/cache of the server profile locally.
>
> They haveroaming profiles, redirected My documents etc, and I have enabled
> Offline files (otherwise they get an error message regarding no rights to
> their "My Documents, Desktop etc).
>
> We have given up on using Offline Files for synchronising so far (too many
> unknown factors). We let them use MS SyncToy, for now.
>
> So, my question:
> Why is the local logon so slooow (2 min vs 10 sec) when their wireless
> network is enabled, and otherwise not ?
>
> I appreciate any help.

There may be something in the original online gpo that is causing
this. take a look at this:

http://technet2.microsoft.com/windowsserver/en/library/9fa19668-626c-4...-9812-f

there is also this:

This is caused by the asyncronous loading of networking during the
boot up process. This 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" and restore your domain logons to their
normal speed, 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 can be fed to clients via a 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.

you may want to change it to "disabled" for offline users.

hope these help,

Michael P. Perrault
MCSE, CCNA, A+, MBA
Senior Systems Engineer,
ScriptLogic Corporation

Michael.Perrault DeleteThis @scriptlogic.com
www.scriptlogic.com