Windows 7 extremely slow login, exchange performance, printer enumeration, etc...
- by Jeff
Background:
I have a fresh copy of Windows 7 Professional x64 on a Dell Latitude E6500. The laptop has 8GB RAM, 250GB drive, and all Intel peripherals (net/wifi/graphics). All available Windows updates, as well as hardware drivers are installed. The IT folks where I work joined the computer to our Windows 2003-based Active Directory domain. There are no errors in any logs that we've looked at, and Group Policy templates appear to have applied properly.
Problem:
Every time I turn on or reboot the computer, it takes between 2 to 10 (all times are actual) minutes after successfully typing my username/password to get to my desktop. My login script does not always run. Sometimes I get a black screen, and a couple of minutes later the login script will pop up and take up to 10 minutes to complete. I can get around this by hitting cntrl-shift-esc and running explorer.exe from the Task Manager. The login script continues to hang, but I can minimize it and go on about my business. Either way, it generally throws errors prior to completing. I often get slow or failed connectivity to Exchange via Outlook. When I bring up printer dialogs, they take several minutes to populate, and block the calling app while doing so. Copies to SMB shares are very slow. On my home network, everything works fine. On both the work network and home network, I can use remote internet resources just fine. Web pages pull up, remote VPN's are fine, I can max out bandwidth on SpeakEasy Speed Test. I can get almost max bandwidth transferring FTP/HTTP over a LAN. Another symptom of the problem is that when I first log in, the work network shows as "Identifying" for a long time in the Network and Sharing Center, and will often then change to the name of the work domain, but say "Unauthenticated Network". Note that this computer previously ran Windows Vista with none of these problems.
Attempts to Fix:
Installed the Win7 admin pack
Uninstalled/reinstalled all hardware drivers
Verified Active Directory DNS settings (Vista works relatively well on the same network)
Reset all TCP/IP settings on all adapters using the netsh commands to do so
Disabled ipv6 on all adapters
Disable wifi adapter while on work network
Locked the network card to 100/Full, 1000/Full; also tried Auto
Added various important addresses to hosts file (exchange, dns, ad) -- removed when didn't help
My background is a jpeg (sounds unrelated but there is apparently a win7 login bug related to solid color background)
More I have forgotten
The IT staff at my company indicated they believe this is due to having Windows 2003 AD servers and not having any Windows 2008 R2 AD servers. Other than that, they have no advice or assistance to offer other than a rebuild (already tried that once with similar symptoms), or downgrade to Vista.
Any thoughts out there?
