Windows
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Force Synchronous Network Startup for MS WinXP
Posted by admin on 22 Oct 2008 | Tagged as: IT Stuff, Windows
One problem I’ve been having recently with MS WinXP workstations connecting and authenticating to a Samba PDC is that the workstation cannot authenticate to the PDC and download the roaming profile (it uses the local cached copy of the profile instead). The problem seems to be occurring quite frequently with a new generation of “power efficient” workstations from several different brand name manufacturers although I did have experience of this with some workstations a couple of years ago.
What seems to happen is that the network does not startup before the Ctrl+Alt+Del and login dialog appears. If the workstation is left for about 5-10 minutes the problem usually goes away. Occasionally though the problem becomes so persistent that no matter how often you reboot and regardless of how long you wait the PDC remains uncontactable. The problem is intermittent and inconsistent, for some workstations it will always happen, for others it only appears sporadically.
How to get around it? I’ve found that forcing windows to start its networking synchronously during the initial workstation startup seems to fix the problem. Making this happen requires a change to registry settings so save the following with a filename of <somefile>.reg …
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon]
“SyncForegroundPolicy”=dword:00000001
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon]
“SyncForegroundPolicy”=dword:00000001
According the docs at Microsoft’s Technet site setting this value to dword 1 causes the operating system to “Always wait for the network at computer startup and logon.” Why two different registry settings? Microsoft’s docs say that the first entry in the Policies section of the registry is all that is needed but when inspecting a workstation registry one day I found this actual attribute (with a setting of dword 0) in the second branch of the registry … “so to be sure, to be sure” I’ve added it in both locations.
