One domain user on our network takes up to 5 minutes to log on to one particular PC (the other domain users can log in in around 10 seconds, and local accounts take only a couple of seconds to sign in on this PC).
This is a well-known error- but what makes this unusual is that only 1 particular domain user account is affected, and only on one particular PC:
This is a clean install of Windows XP Professional, with almost no software installed. The only twist is that this is a remote computer connecting to the main site (where the domain controller is located) via a Hamachi VPN gateway network.
Once logged in, the user with the slow logon is also unable to browse network shares on the server at the main site (although pinging hosts on the central site is successful). Simply typing "\\server" does not show the network shares (as it should for a domain user), instead Windows asks for domain credentials as if a local (rather than a domain) user account is trying to access it.
Initially I suspected DNS to be the problem, however everything in DNS looks the same when logged in as either user- I am unable to find anything different in the problematic user account:
It's definitely not a corrupted profile- it was only created 2 days ago (signed in for the first time using that account this week). Also, I have just deleted and recreated the profile from scratch- and the issue still persists.
Both users are in the same OU in Active Directory, so I can't see how this would be related to Group Policy.
I can log in as any other user, and everything goes back to normal again. The issue is 100% repeatable.
Any ideas would be much appreciated. This has me stumped.
Best Answer
It seems that your problem is SMB / CIFS: I suspect that this particular user has Network Shares mapped, which of course are being connected at logon - or at least, are being tried to be connected. Which fails, and the timeouts are quite high for this.
However, while this causes a slow logon, it is not necessarily the root of your problems; as you have reported, this user has problems to connect to shares at all. I'd recommend to investigate this issue. Don't exclude network problems yet; being able to ping does not mean you're able to mount shares. Confirm with a different, working account.