That's really more of a client consideration on XP and above. By default computer policy processes in the foreground at startup on servers and they only perform asynchronous processing on refresh cycles. XP introduced the asynchronous processing at startup. By default, XP logs a user on in asynchronous mode and Group Policy is then applied in the background after the user is logged on.
If I understood him correctly OP was talking about this event occurring on his newly virtualized DC at startup. That's one the reasons I asked him if the background refreshes were occurring as a first step in determining what was going on. I'd bet it has to do with a race condition as he mentioned that the DC also hosted DNS, that fact and it's being a VM leaves a lot of variables to consider. -----Original Message----- From: Ben Scott [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, March 11, 2009 6:34 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Re: Error in event log On Wed, Mar 11, 2009 at 10:56 AM, Free, Bob <[email protected]> wrote: > That frequently occurs when the network is not entirely "ready" at startup > when the system is starting up all its services for a variety of different > reasons. Setting the GPO options to apply group policy in foreground and synchronously seems to help this. For us, anyway. -- Ben ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
