WinXP logging into W2K domain

[desdae]

I have to administer a network with ~15 computers. There is a server running "Win2K server". There are many machines with win98SE. When a network user logs in from win98 machine, the process takes less than 10 seconts. But now I have installed WinXP Pro on two machines. When I log in to those machines locally as administrator, the process is fast, but when I try to log in with any network user into the domain, it becomes awfully slow - each "applying computer settings" and "applying user settings" takes about 5 minutes or more. I have installed everything from MS update on XP machines. But that does not solve the problem.And it's also very problematic to connect to any shares of XP machines from 98SE machines. Sometimes they are not found, sometimes mystical IPC$ password is asked.What is wrong?This really starts to make me emotional

[Peachy]

Welcome desdae! Could you give us a little more background on your network, please. What speed is your hub/switch. What hardware is your XP box running on compared to your Win98SE boxes. You may have to disable roaming profiles for user accounts that log on from XP hosts. It shouldn't take that long even if you have roaming profiles enabled, though. Are you by any chance centralising My Document mappings to the server?

[desdae]

Could you give us a little more background on your network, please. What speed is your hub/switch. What hardware is your XP box running on compared to your Win98SE boxes. You may have to disable roaming profiles for user accounts that log on from XP hosts. It shouldn't take that long even if you have roaming profiles enabled, though. Are you by any chance centralising My Document mappings to the server?

All lan cards and hubs/swiches are 100Mbps - that really should not be the issue.The funniest thing is that win98SE used to be on the same boxes where XP pro is now installed on. So it should not be a hardware problem... One of them is Celeron 1.7GHz, 256MB Ram, other 1.3GHz cele with 128MB Ram, server is P4-2GHz with 512MB ram.There are logon scripts for each user group which map the neccessary network drives.e.g.net use H: \\servername\resource$There is one shared folder for all users, and each user also has his own personal folder on server. Centralized document storing is used for easier backuping process, which happens once per 24 hours.One more detail.When I just log off from XP box, not rebooting the box, then next log on takes only like 1-3 minutes. After complete restart logging on again takes 5-10 minutes. Hehe, and users kind of do not understand this :)I have decided to change operating system, because winXP is much more stable that win98. But now I am confused :/ Usually process "applying your personal settings" takes the longest time... One solution would be not to log on domain, but log on locally on those machines, but then I have to map all drives on each machine for each user that will use em... and when anything changes, again I have to do all the changes on each machine... And there are many security issues here...I really know that the log on process into domain should not take sooooo long.

[Peachy]

Do you have IntelliMirror (the file synchronisation service) enabled? If you do this is what may be causing the heavy traffic across your network. IntelliMirror copies the user's personal storage from the server to the local machine each time they log on. If they make any changes to the local copy, only the changed files are copied back to the server. The idea behind this is that if the connection to the server is severed, the user can continue working on the local files and the changes will be resynched with the server's copies when the network connection is restored. Now, if a user has gigabytes of files on the server, you can imagine the bandwidth that will be consumed during a domanin logon. Network speed probably isn't the bottleneck, but most likely is the speed of the hard drive. Do you know the specs of the hard drives in the Celerons? If they are 5400 rpm speeds this may be a factor in the time it takes for the personal files to be copied over.