Windows 7 – Slow Logon

By admin • June 9th, 2010

Windows 7 is undoubtedly Microsoft’s best desktop operating system to date, a much needed boost following the somewhat disappointing release of the Vista OS.

A common problem with Windows 7, recently picked up by Acorn’s Hertfordshire IT consultants, is that after joining it to a domain logons suddenly become painfully slow. There are a number of suggested fixes out there, most noteably that of setting the desktop background as an image rather than a solid colour (a bug noted in a Microsoft forum post).

However, in this article we examin another cause of the “slow logon” problem which centres around DNS. If the Domain Controller for the domain to which the Windows 7 PC is joined is multi-homed (that is joined to more than one network) , then Windows 7 clients may experience issues with slow logins which are not experienced with XP or Vista clients. On the Windows 7 client if you run nslookup and try to resolve domain.local or whatever your local FQDN is you may see more than one entry returned. In this situation a slow logon may result. The same can occur if there are additional bogus DNS entries, perhaps carried over from a SBS Swing mirgration or virtualisation project. Simply deleting these bogus entries in the DNS for the domain will resolve the slow logon issue. For multi-homed domain controllers, more drastic action may be required, but the situation can at least be allieviated in the short term by using a local hosts file to resolve the FQDN for the domain to the correct, single IP address.

In short, we can see that Windows 7 handles DNS in a very different way to previous Microsoft desktop operating sytems and care must be taken to ensure that the domain environment is configured correctly.

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Windows 7 – Slow Logon