Broadcom Netxtreme Gigabit Controller and Roaming Profiles

[Guest]

We recently purchased 31 Dell OptiPlex GX280s with the Integrated Broadcom
Netxtreme 57xx Gigabit Ethernet card installed on the system. We are trying
to logon to the PCs with Windows 2000 roaming profiles and they are not able
to load the ntuser.dat files. We are able to successfully log on to other
Dell PCs that do not have this NIC card. We contacted Dell Support and they
could not provide us with any help whatsoever (which was very disappointing).
(We contacted Broadcom and they told us we had to use Dell's support. We
contacted Microsoft's support and they told us we had to use Dell's support.)
We have experimented changing the Speed and Duplex settings but the changes
have not made a difference. We downloaded the latest driver from Broadcom's
web site and this did not alleviate the problem. Does anyone know what could
be causing the problem with loading the ntuser.dat file?

 

[Ryan Hanisco]

Carrie,

This "probably" isn't due to the cards themselves but something to do with
the way the OS is commonly installed on all of the workstations. Can you
post the exact errors that you are seeing in the event logs?

Are local profiles being created?
Are IP addresses ok?
Can the PDCe be contacted?
Were the workstations correctly joined to the domain?

There are a lot of things to check. Let us know.

 

[Guest]

Ryan,
The card itself works under the local administrator profile in that the
device manager does not report any problems, we can obtain an IP address from
the DHCP server and we can ping local servers, including our main DC using AD.

We decided to start from scratch on our PC image to see if there was a
software conflict with our anti-virus software or even with a Microsoft
security update.

When we reghosted the PC with a factory image, we were able to log in to the
network with no problems. We have reinstalled almost all software
applications, including our anti-virus software, and the problem has not
reappeared. We will wait to see if a Windows security patch causes the
problem. Fingers crossed.

Thanks for all of your suggestions and for responding to my question.