Slow Windows logins

Many remote connections or requests to a Windows® server can cause delayed logins with your users. This article covers some basic steps you can take to confirm and troubleshoot this issue.

Problem

A slow login on Windows is characterized by long user login attempts, which take a minute or two before getting disconnected. The disconnnect results in an alert in Event Viewer. High resource usage on the local server or Domain Controller can cause some of these issues. However, if you don’t see slow overall performance and the resource utilization for CPU, RAM and disk were below 40%, the following solution might be helpful:

You might see an entry similar to the following example alert in the Event Viewer if you are having a slow login issue with your server:

• Log Name: Microsoft-Windows-TerminalServices-RemoteConnectionManager/Admin
• Source: Microsoft-Windows-TerminalServices-RemoteConnectionManager
• Date: 12/17/2019 2:40:15 PM
• Event ID: 20499
• Task Category:None
• Level: Warning
• Keywords:
• User: NETWORK SERVICE
• Computer: 123456-exampledomain.com
• Description: Remote Desktop Services has taken too long to load the user configuration from server \123456-exampledomain.com for user rsadmin

Resolution:

You can now turn off the Domain Controller requests during user logon, which avoids the window for the deadlock and fixes the performance issues. To fix this issue in Windows Server 2012, you must upgrade to Windows Server 2012 R2. On Windows Server 2012 R2, create the fQueryUserConfigFromLocalMachine registry entry according to the following steps.

Note: This change does not require a reboot of the system.

To make the registry change, follow these steps:

1. To start the Registry Editor, press the Windows logo key + R, type regedit.exe in the Open box, and click OK.

2. In the Registry Editor, locate and click one of the following registry subkeys:

    HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows NT\Terminal Services
   

3. In the Edit menu, select New, and then select DWORD Value.

4. Enter fQueryUserConfigFromLocalMachine.

5. Press and hold (or right-click) fQueryUserConfigFromLocalMachine and select Modify.

6. In the Value data box, type 1 and select OK.

7. Exit the Registry Editor.

**Note: For Windows Server 2016, you don’t have to update registry keys in Windows Server 2016 because the updated behavior is the default.

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