Enforcing Active Desktop Wallpaper policy causes slow connected PCs to froze after login...

[SammyBar]

Hi,

I needed to set a group policy for the most of the workstation (but not all)
to use the same wallpaper. Then I created a GPO at the domain level. I set
Administrative templates/Desktop/Active Desktop Wallpaper policy to point to
a bitmap (938KB size) that is located at a shared folder in one of the
servers. I created a global security group that holds the users that will be
affected by this policy. Then I configured the GPO security to affect only
the users on this security group.
It worked as expected but... We have some branches with extremely slow
network links (64Kb/s). All the workstations normally boots at the morning
approx. at the same time. Then when we introduced about 100 users on the
group, some reported that after login the PC froze while showing "loading
user setting" dialog. It repeated for various days so we removed all users
from the security group asociated with the GPO. The problem dissappeared. So
we reached to the conclusion the GPO Active Desktop Wallpaper tries to load
the wallpaper from the server each time the user logs in. It does not caches
the bitmap on the client workstation. When all the workstations login at the
morning it created a bottlenect when all tryed to download the bmp, thought
it is not too big...
-Is it a reasonable explanation?
-Is it any way to make the enforcing of this policy more efficient?

My DCs are windows 2000. Clients are XP.

Any suggestion is welcomed
Thanks in advance
Sammy

 

[Richard Oltmann]

If possible could you copy the wallpaper down to their c: drive and the set
the group policy to point to this, or if there is a local server move the
wallpaper to it and point the group policy to it
Richard

 

[Florian Frommherz]

Howdy Sammy!

It worked as expected but... We have some branches with extremely slow
network links (64Kb/s). All the workstations normally boots at the morning
approx. at the same time. Then when we introduced about 100 users on the
group, some reported that after login the PC froze while showing "loading
user setting" dialog. It repeated for various days so we removed all users
from the security group asociated with the GPO. The problem dissappeared. So
we reached to the conclusion the GPO Active Desktop Wallpaper tries to load
the wallpaper from the server each time the user logs in. It does not caches
the bitmap on the client workstation. When all the workstations login at the
morning it created a bottlenect when all tryed to download the bmp, thought
it is not too big...

Well why don't you try to convert the bitmap? 900KB over a 64KBit line
is more than torture - especially if there are multiple users that shall
download it.

Is it necessary to have this wallpaper as a bitmap? Why don't you
activate Active Desktop and use a JPG-file or something equivalent with
a smaller file size?

If you really want to use your wallpaper as a bitmap, try to create a
computer startup script that checks if the wallpaper is existing at
%windir%\wallpapername.bmp. If yes, it skips - if not, it downloads the
wallpaper from the server _once_.

cheers,

Florian