Windows domain clients

Hello all,

This is my first post on here so I hope this makes sense. I have had problems when I set up clients on a Windows domain. I have a Windows 2003 server and when I try to set up Windows clients (2000 or XP) and I set them up as anything but an administrator, EXPLORER.EXE uses almost all resources. I have looked several places and find very little about it. I would like to be able to set up users as something less than Administrator, mainly so I can deny access to installing software and making changes to their desktops, etc. Has anyone out there had this problem and know of a fix for it? This is obviously very frustrating. I would appreciate any help anyone can give. I will give as much information anyone needs to help me. Thanks.

Dan

 

Welcome to the board.

As i understand your problem, you are doing new installs of Win2000 and XP client machines. When you create a new user account that is not a member of the administrators group, and that user account logs in, the client PC indicates 100% CPU usage in explorer.exe?

Please correct anything i've misunderstood.

What have you installed besides the default operating system on these machines? Something in your build proceedure (some third party software) or your environment (an invasive login script that needs to run as admin to work) is causing this phenomenon.

Have you done an incremental build of the machine to determine at what point the machine goes nutzo?

Have you taken a perfmon to confirm its explorer (and user or kernel time)?

Have you tried running pstat? This would let you identify which DLLs are running in explorer, that are different than a default build?

If you login to a machine that is malfunctioning as an administrator, does the problem reproduce?
If you add that user account to the admin group, does the phenomenon dissapear?

 

This is happening when I just get either Win2K or XP installed with no other software installed. When I add a user who is not in the administrators group, the CPU usage for Explorer.exe will go to close to 100% or at 100%. If I change the user to an administrator the problem disappears. This happens on any pc, no matter what the configuration. I have not tried perfmon or pstat.

Dan

 

What happens if you leave the domain and go back to workgroup?
What do your login scripts do?
What policies are you pushing?

It has to be one of those two, im betting it doesnt repro in a workgroup. My guess is that you are pushing something that is going into a tailspin without admin priviledges.

 

When I change back to the workgroup, it does not reproduce the issue. Not sure what policies I may be pushing. Not exactly sure what you mean by that. If you can tell me where to look for that, I can let you know. Thanks for your help.

 

we would be talking about either login scripts, or GPOs/Group Policies.

You can use gpresult /v to get a list of the policies being applied to a machine.

 

To be honest, I would not know what to look for when I run gpresult /v that could be causing the issue.

 

Post the info here and we can take a look.

From a cmd prompt

Code:

gpresult /v > c:\gpresult.txt

and copy the contents of the text file and paste that to a reply in this thread.