Slow Logon With Windows 7 and Winlogon Events 6005 6006

One of our users recently complained that loging in to his Windows 7 laptop could take over two minutes.

While my first instinct said, "well that isn't that bad" we did look into it a bit. This user works remotely exclusively. So even though their machine is a domain member, they are never on our physical network.

Their machine would produce 2 application event log warnings:

Event 6005, Winlogon:
The winlogon notification subscriber is taking a long time to handle the notification event (Logon).

AND

Event 6006, Winlogon:
The winlogon notification subscriber took XXX second(s) to handle the notification event (Logon).

We were able to reproduce this on test machines, but only on networks other than our production LAN. Booting the machine with NO network (no ethernet and wifi disabled) did not produce the issue. Booting on our production LAN the systems booted quickly and warning free.

It turns out the problem was that our domain user accounts are set with a home folder map (in our case H:\) to a network share.

Going in to AD Users and Computers on a DC, user properties, profile tab, and setting the "Home folder" option to "local path" (which is blank) resolved the issue for us.

Of course, we are not doing this for everyone, as most users appreciate having a mapped H: drive, And while there are other ways to get this done, this way works best for us.