Yes, that was a discussion a good while back by Bob Free. March 9, 2012 to be exact.
We had a PSS PFE onsite recently for an AD engagement and we were discussing slow boots during a break in the action and he brought up something I had never heard of before. I was always under the assumption that we had what is known as Fast Logon Optimization on our XP systems that allows GPOs to process asynchronously in the background. He told us that it is disabled in our environment because we use the profile settings to map homeDir and specify login script. Basically anything that is set on the Profile tab in ADUC is considered legacy NT behavior and disables logon optimization. I had heard before that roaming profiles or software installation policies disabled it but this was news to me. I played around with my account on an old XP box and it rang true, never got around to looking into it further or on WIN7. FWIW, YMMV :) Ken Schaefer replied: http://www.google.com/search?q=GPO+background+processing+AD+Profile+Logon+Script first link describes the Win XP behaviour that Bob mentions. Thread is (homedrive) Thanks Webster From: listsad...@lists.myitforum.com [mailto:listsad...@lists.myitforum.com] On Behalf Of James Rankin Sent: Friday, May 10, 2013 4:28 AM To: NTSysADM@lists.myitforum.com Subject: [NTSysADM] Home drives Just following on from some of the comments yesterday, in this age of UNC-redirected libraries, variables and system folders, is there really any need for a home drive to be mapped at all? Surely we should just now be able to get away with a "home area" that our folders are redirected to? Interestingly enough, Folder Redirection GPOs can't be pointed at a drive letter since XP/2003, it has to be a UNC path. I just did a bit of an audit on my own behaviour and found that I simply click on My Documents, Downloads, etc. to access my files. There's very little interaction with the "home drive" at all, I just click the links and I'm into the network area. There's also the thought about people who define the home folder through ADUC on the Profile tab, didn't I read somewhere (possibly on this list) that defining anything in the Profile tab slows down Group Policy processing? If anyone knows if there's a documented article on this I'd be grateful for a link to it. Anyway, I'd be very interested in people's thoughts regarding the home drive situation, it would be nice to get a broader view of it. Cheers, -- James Rankin Technical Consultant (ACA, CCA, MCTS) http://appsensebigot.blogspot.co.uk<http://appsensebigot.blogspot.co.uk/>
