Solved Windows 7 Group Policy

[devlin7]

In the last few weeks I have noticed that around 30 of our 400 machines have got stuck applying Group Policy. The DISK drive light is hard on. If the machines are rebooted they get stuck at the same point after the reboot. If left alone they remain stuck. However, if you restart the machine say the next day they boot up instantly like nothing was ever wrong. I suspect it is doing whether it is doing a full group policy apply or part.

Is there anyone else experiencing such weird behaviour? I keen to find out why the disk is at 100%?

 

[Fayla]

When the machines boot up and login, check their event viewer for more detailed error information.

My computer is not part of a domain and I don't have those issues. However, you can set a machine to reboot if group policy fails to apply. Looking at the settings of how group policy deals with failures may help.

In the last few weeks I have noticed that around 30 of our 400 machines have got stuck applying Group Policy. The DISK drive light is hard on. If the machines are rebooted they get stuck at the same point after the reboot. If left alone they remain stuck. However, if you restart the machine say the next day they boot up instantly like nothing was ever wrong. I suspect it is doing whether it is doing a full group policy apply or part.

Is there anyone else experiencing such weird behaviour? I keen to find out why the disk is at 100%?

 

[devlin7]

As it turns out, I think that I have solved it. It seems that there is a firmware bug in the network switches we use. The switches have been running at 90-100% CPU and so have been struggling with network traffic BIG TIME. Group policies were freezing because they had lost contact with the servers.

 

[devlin7]

Well I didn't solve it. Four machines affected in our library today. The machines get to applying the computer policy and hang. I can logon via SAFE mode + networking with no issue however, the disk is thrashing badly. It turns out that some moron is turning the power off in the building when leaving at night. So I expect all my problems have been caused by this. So powering off the machines without shutting them down seems to trigger this issue. The process that is thrashing the disk is a service which seems to be doing something with c:\windows\system32\wbem\repository\index.btr but I am not sure this is what cause group policy not to apply. The eventvwr only show an error saying that group policy is taking a LONG time to apply. Tomorrow I suspect all four machines will be working again but I don't know what triggers that either.

Anyone any ideas?

 

[devlin7]

As suspected the machines are working again this morning. I have uninstalled indexing on two machines and will monitor. The machines are getting low on disk space 3-5gb. This is to do with there being 700 -1000 user profiles on each machine. There isn't a tool for removing old profiles in windows 7 so I am not sure what to do about this.

 

[brennca]

Group Policy for deleting old user profiles

There is a GPO for deleting old user profiles. Under Computer Config/System/User Profiles/Delete user profiles older than a specified number of days on system restart.