Good morning,
Our environment is a Windows 2008 AD domain (previously 2003) with 7 Win2k3 Terminal Servers running Citrix Presentation Server 4.5 on them. The issue I'm reporting is about slow logons and a possible work around for this issue.
In our environment when users logged into the Citrix server the login takes a little under one minute which is decent but when looking at the userenv.log a noticeable lapse of inactivity appears during the logon process
USERENV(4820.f08) 19:14:55:871 LibMain: Process Name: M:\WINDOWS\system32\userinit.exe
USERENV(23a0.2928) 19:15:15:730 PolicyChangedThread: Leaving
That's about 20 seconds of inactivity which I was trying to figure out as to why. This had bothered me for some time but most users were okay with a one minute login so I pushed it aside and only now came back to this issue.
Searching online revealed a KB article of KB941158 (http://support.microsoft.com/com/kb/941158) which suggested that this issue was with IE8 not processing the Internet Explorer Maintenance Group Policy (GPO) settings correctly. This KB offers a hotfix which iterates the ieaksie.dll file to an updated version that should eliminate this problem.
When I checked the version of this file on our terminal server the version number is HIGHER than the one listed on this hotfix. Version number on our server is 8.0.6001.18702.
So it would appear that if the hotfix did fix things another update broke it again or it was never fixed in the first place.
My resolution to this was to turn off any GPOs with IE Maintenance Group settings. In our case those settings were handling proxy settings.
I therefore found the proxy settings in the registry and created a GPO that handles those settings via registry updates.
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\InternetSettings
"Proxy Enable" (DWORD Value of 1)
"ProxyServer" (STRING)
"ProxyOverride" (STRING)
When testing against a server before normal business hours my login time for my test account dropped from about 45 seconds to about 15-20.
