Slow xp logon

This is the SOLUTION I found

HI all.
After getting crazy for fours months here the solution to save you some pain.

Once I've fould out that the workstation service was slowing the all start up / login process with windows XP.
Here I am posting some considerations.
First the problem appear as a very slow login after typing your passord prior the desktop to appear.
The problem also appeared as an infinite need to repair continuously the connection (right clicking on the wireless icon) or often as inability to

connect wirelessly.

The SOLUTION to the problem "login to XP takes forever" is to remove any other software that manages the wireless card and let only the native Windows

Wireless Zero Configuration to handle it but the problem immediately desappear!!!.
Once you unistall any other software excepts the drivers of the wireless card, you must go on control panel/network

connections/advanced/general/properties/wirelss network and click on Use
Windows to configure my wireless network settings which will anable the native Windows Wireless Zero Configuration.

The problem is probably found in many computer that have the intel centrino chip set which uses the Intel(R) PRO/Wireless 3945ABG Network Connection but

maybe is with any other wireless
card that uses the intel software to manage.

Myself I did also utilize a second D-Link wireless card which was also utilizing its own software to manage and could work with the native Wireless Zero

Configuration) but it turned out because of the Intel(R) PRO/Wireless manager.
Myself just to be safe I unistalled also the D-Link softwarebut is not really necessary.

TWO MORE IMPORTANT Considerations:
THE PROBLEM DID NOT IMMEDIATELY GO AWAY!
1)
I had to reinstall (from an image I had) the entire operating system and then remove the Intel Wirelss manager from it.If I was not removing the Intel SW

the problem after few hours the problem reappeared (I restored the OS from the image like 30 times so I am certain).
For many people the problem will go away immediately just unistalling the wirelss software but that was not my case.
If you do not want to uninstall the operating system.you may go through a procedure to reset entirely the networking in your OS, I know there is a way to

do it but I never researched it.
(Maybe all you need to do is to remove all network conncections by uninsalling all drivers I chose to restart with a new XP)

2)
I utilize 2 wireless cards and I am having a second minor issue:
IF I DISABLE the wireless switch of my Intel card and connect the 2nd one, the pc still says that there are network available on the 1st. In other words

the card is not entirely off. I use a brand new DELL LATITUDE D820. Maybe this is to avoid the Plug&Play procedure.
As result I see two wireless icons on the bottom right when I only want one and altough the external DLINK says that is correctly connected to the

wireless network, Windows still seem to remain internally connected to the Intel one and as result will still be unable to see a webpage.
In order to "connect" Windows to the correct external network card I must click on its repair button (right click on its icon) and then everything is

ok. Maybe this is another bug of the os which wouldn't come as a real surprise.
I hope this all note will be useful to you and save you a lot of time.
Good luck!
PS
If you find on the web that the prefetcher is the problem.. I think it is not true.

Disabling the Wireless adapter through Windows (by simply right clicking and choosing disable) solved my issue with a Toshiba laptop that was experiencing this problem.

I also removed many of the cached wireless connections (over 40) and it logged in to Windows in less than 10 seconds.

Thanks for your help, as I had tried numerous registry hacks, Windows re-installs, driver updates, DNS entries, etc...without any luck.

WINS caused problem for me

WINS was my main issue and removing that caused the login slowness to disappear. Basically the DHCP service we had, was out of date and removing the offending WINS entry caused everything to speed up to the same speed as a local account login.

I also removed the machine from the domain and rejoined but I'm pretty sure that WINS was the cause and not leaving and rejoining the domain.

BTW my domain was already .local - just FYI.

XP Slow Logon

I had the exact same problem with a user. If I logged in as her, it was painfully slow. If I logged in as me, it was very fast. After trying all the tricks, and tweakes, I saw someone had come up with wireless card problem. When I went and look, my users had 15 different wireless networks that the laptop was looking for, before if would log in. Set to look for infrastructure only, and Bang...problem solved.
Thanks to all that posted for the help.

Hi all, I had the same problem wit slow logon on XP and disabling the wireless card worked for me. After that also the Cisco VPN client was again able to start before login. Two issues solved with such a simple solution! Computer is a hp laptop. Many thanks for all the great tips here. Headache is gone

same here but no wireless adapter

Hi all. I have the same delay problem on a tower pc in a domain since I installed a new domain controller to replace the existing one. When the user on this particular machine logs on the login window disapear and the wallpaper and mouse are the only things around for 40 seconds precisely. After many attempts I realised that by disabling the "Plug and Play" service the 40 seconds are gone. So I enabled the service again and disconnected the usb connection of the phone (for address book) and the logon was now delayed of only 5-10 seconds. I post here because when I ran BootVis this 40 seconds lap was pointed to a "Network Delay" showing 3 files as delaying the boot process. Unfortunately for me this computer has no wireless adapter and the domain is a .local and the dns works fine (server side) and the mapped drives are all working and there is no WINS server and it's a windows 2003 domain controller working in mixed 2000 mode (there is another domain in the same network which has a windows 2000 domain controller).

I have run ipconfig /flushdns but maybe there are other old junk to clean but I don't know where and how to, do you have any thoughts? Thanks.

PS for the ones with wireless you can change the priority order of use of your network adapters in the settings of the windows where you can see all your network connections under windows xp. in some cases it solves the slow logon because it will directly try with cable.

What worked for me

I was going crazy with the slow login process problem, and here is what finally worked for me. I went in and saw that the user having the problem had more than 10 wireless networks that he had attached to and they were all set to automatically connect. I deleted all but one wireless connection (which was his main home wireless connection), and then shutdown and restarted. Login time went down to 20 seconds from beginning to end. This is what finally worked for me, so here's hoping it helps others out there. Cheers!

Suggest moderator lock this thread> use for research only, not new posts.

While this is a fairly common problem, this thread was started 5 years ago.

Please refer to: http://www.techspot.com/vb/topic53669.html
For basic troubleshooting slow computer.