One of the most distasteful features of using Windows Vista and Windows 7 computers in a domain environment is their tendency to freeze during the Group Policy application phase of user logon. Although it is known that there were some instances of this occurring with Windows XP as well, we never saw these happen in our experience and first saw the problem in Windows Vista and Windows 7. The most common scenario for these problems is during the deployment of Group Policy Preferences for Printers. Extremely long timeouts going up to overnight in duration have been observed on some occasions, most commonly when a new computer is logged into for the first time. Although today I saw a laptop take a very long time to apply Folder Redirection policy, this is unusual whereas GPPP is the most common scenario by far. Even though event logging is greatly improved in Windows 7, there is still insufficient information recorded in the event logs for these instances. My latest effort is to get all the logging options turned on, both those specifically for GPPP logging and user environment processing, and hopefully with the logs now being produced routinely on all our computers we might get some progress towards resolving this matter. The fact that MS has failed to address this to date is a serious concern from my POV, even to the extent their logon processing should force the logon to continue after a reasonable period of time without these very excessive delays.
