Hangs during Applying Personal Settings

[A Lake]

I've got a network of around 500 PCs running XP Sp2/Sp3 and 2003 Servers.
Occasionally (around 15-20 in the last 4 weeks) a PC hangs at the Apply
Personal Settings stage. After waiting for 10 minutes or so, switching PC off
and on again is the only solution.

There seems to be no problem with DNS, rebooting the PC makes it work fine
again - and when the PC has hung at this stage I can still connect to it
using the Computer managerment console so it seems unlikely to be a
networking issue?

The only thing I've noticed is that out of the 15-20 PCs affected, none of
them have done it twice (yet!) and all of them are different ages,
manufacturers and on several different subnets!

Any suggestions are where to look next? I'm a bit stumped on this on.

 

[Bob Lin \(MS-MVP\)]

Any errors in the Event Viewer?

--
Bob Lin, Microsoft-MVP, MCSE & CNE
Networking, Internet, Routing, VPN Troubleshooting on
http://www.ChicagoTech.net
How to Setup Windows, Network, VPN & Remote Access on
http://www.HowToNetworking.com

 

[A Lake]

No errors logged - either before or after the reboot.

I enabled verbose logging as well, and this still shows 'Applying Personal
Settings'

Theres no hard drive activity, yet I can ping the network card and connect
to the remote management from another pc OK.

This has happened several times again since I first posted. Again different
pcs on different subnets and a reboot sorts the problem!

 

[Bob Lin \(MS-MVP\)]

Posting the result of nslookup and ipconfig /all may help.

--
Bob Lin, Microsoft-MVP, MCSE & CNE
Networking, Internet, Routing, VPN Troubleshooting on
http://www.ChicagoTech.net
How to Setup Windows, Network, VPN & Remote Access on
http://www.HowToNetworking.com

 

[A Lake]

All the pcs are DHCP and get the correct DNS server entries, the nslookup
works fine for anything I specify.

Thing is, a reboot later and all is working - so it seems unlikely to be a
DHCP/IP config problem

 

[A Lake]

This is now becoming a major problem-at least 50 incidents now and counting.
Some PCs have now done this twice.

Theres no common thread, different PCs, different subnets and different
users and times of day. It has happened on Sp2 and Sp3 machines.

I left one for a full hour this morning before giving up and restarting -
during that hour I could remotely manage it, but the PC itself appeared hung
(i.e no response to CTRL-ALT-DEL)

I tried to get a remote tasklist but this hung as well. Theres no error in
any of the logs - the normal events appear and then stop as if the machine
was hung. The security logs are updated as I remotely manage the machine but
thats it!

Very frustrating - anyone got any ideas?

 

[johnwint]

I am having the same issue with some VM's and Blade desktops on our network.
Maybe 4 or 5 users a day. A reboot is how they resolve it. I have noticed
that when it happens if we remotely shut down the WMI service the machine
logs right in. Seems to have something to do with GPO processing.

Were you able to find a root cause?

 

[Thomas T]

I have this problem but it is due to the fact that I cloned the hard disk in the PC connected to the network and the clone hangs when it is "applying personal settings".

I have several computers I need to upgrade. I hope to clone the old hard disks so that the upgraded computers will boot and connect to the network with no additional work needing to be done by the network administrator.

I am only a tech with no network knowledge. The administration is an external company that wants $350 to "set up" a new or upgraded PC on the network so I am trying to work around them.

So how can I clone the drives so they connect to the network as before?

Thomas