xp desktop hangs at loading profile, takes 100% CPU

[w00005414]

Periodically with our XP linked clone desktop pool we notice in vSphere that a desktop triggers the CPU alarm and the real time performance monitor shows it is still pegged at 100% CPU. We noticed that in the "Events" on View Manager the person is showing to have logged in and then after 15 minutes we get a "Warn" entry that their session expired. Within the "Remote Sessions" monitor in View Manager the session is still showing the user being connected (even though the "Events" showed the person's session was expired) and on their "Remote Sessions" entry the "Security Gateway" field is empty and the "Display Protocol" is showing "Console" (even before we go in with the Console). We then hop on the console of the VM and it is at the screen where Windows is copying the user's new profile into place (we do not use roaming profiles, it is just taking the Default User hidden profile folder onto their own folder under C:\Documents and Settings) and it hangs there, it says

Setting up personalize settings for:

Microsoft Outlook Express 6

What we have to power off the VM (a hard reset since we can't shut it off within Windows) then it usually comes up fine.

This isn't the first time this happened unfortunately, it happens maybe 10 times a week.

[mpryor]

Do you have a particularly large default profile on the template? Still constructing the profile after 15 minutes is excessive. If so I would recommend building a new cleaner default profile, note that with quickprep the default profile isn't copied from the administrator account like with sysprep on XP SP2, so you do really need to set it up in (what will ultimately be) the pool template.

[w00005414]

Thanks for the reply, the Default User profile is roughly 27 MB which isn't too large. We use a special local user account named "template" and do all of our customizations in there then log out then log in as the local Administrator and copy the template user's profile on top of the "Default User" folder by right mouse clicking on "My Computer" and going to "Properties" -> "Advanced" -> "User Profiles", we select the local template user then select "Copy To".

I wonder if this problem is stemming from a system time issue we were seeing on the desktops (I had it as a separate post and you had replied to it earlier today, thanks). If the user has logged in and the VMware tools decides to sync the clock with the ESX server and the time gets thrown off by 11 years in the future I bet that would somehow affect that computer's ability to work with the domain which would interfere with the profile copy.

We turned off the VMware Tools time sync and we'll see how we do :smileyconfused: