Slow login, non-persistent desktops...roaming profiles?

[morrisosu]

Ok everybody I have a good one, we are using View 4.0.1 build-233023 and when we use non-persistent Windows XP Pro 32bit desktops we are running into the issue of a slow login during the period where Windows applies the user’s “personalized settings”. The delay isn't terrible but it's going to cause gripes. I'm assuming this delay occurs because the user does not have a profile on the newly created VM.

We have experimented with AD roaming profiles and thus far there hasn’t been any help. Does anyone have any ideas to avoid the "personalized setting event"? We would really like to move to non-persistent desktops, as managing persistent ones isn’t really feasible in View 4.0.

Thanks for everyone’s help!

[JugOfTuiPlease]

As far as I know, this is one of the trade offs to having a non-persistent pool.

Until a user has managed to log into every VM, hence have a copy of the roaming profile locally, logons will be a bit slower.

[morrisosu]

I was afraid that might be the case, thanks again for the info!

[mittim12]

You could try to load as much as possible into the default user profile to try and cut down on login times.

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[Damo007 · Accepted solution]

I had this exact problem and it took me about two months to get my gold image down to what I was happy with through research, trial& error and many rebuilds.

I used a combination of non-persistent desktops, folder redirection, roaming profiles and I disabled all the personalized setting stuff (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/238441) and now my images are very snappy and working perfectly for my environment (school).

I assume you've alinged the disks in your goldy and optimised it to buggery. Because before i did that my image was sluggish on login. The performance difference now between my old image and new image is like night and day.

Good luck!

[JCL225]

I agree with Damo007.

Between folder redirection and, roaming profiles, and 'removing personalize settings..' article from MS, it makes for a much better logon and user experience.

I just want to add a comment about the MS article. Its great for removing those pesky IE and misc new user settings on a PC. However you lose some flexibility in customizing default desktop settings for new users. In Windows XP, by default the local Administrator account settings are used to customize some default settings for creating new user profiles, such as setting screensavers, background wallpaper, folder views[list, icon, etc], enabling quicklaunch toolbar, default internet brower, etc etc. If you modify the registry to delete the keys with the STUBPATH or whichever value is mentioned in the MS article, then it severs those ties and syncing up.

You can set all the options by Group Policy and logon scripts, however you have to know where all the options are and you don't always get the fine tuning details you have when setting through the windows ui.

The other option is to modify the hidden 'default user' profile. Since you can't log on as the default user profile, you should create a local account, called template or some unique name, log on, modify the ui however you want, log off and back on as the local admin (or any local administrator) and then copy all of the contents from the template to the default user profile folder.

[jaksun]

In my environment it helped just fiddling with folder redirect for the heavy stuff like my documents and the desktop. I still have everything else as default.

[morrisosu]

This is all good info! I'm going to try the removal of the personalized settings and see how it works!

Thanks so much for everyone's input!

Shane

[buckethead]

The suggestions that the others in this discussion have provided are great and should really help to improve the overall experience. We did a lot of the suggestions a couple of years ago and it helped but wasn't enough for our demanding users. We went out and bought Environment Manager from AppSense to help with our profiles. There are many other companies out there so if the suggestions do not get you to the level that your users need you may want to look at some of those products. Hopefully you will not need those products and you will not need to add any additional costs to your deployment.