The case of the mysterious 10 minute logon delay

While looking at other things in Windows 7 I noticed that the Winlogon Notification timeout has been increased from 2 minutes to 10 minutes.

This made me think about an earlier post I had on the subject of Winlogon Notifiers timing out after a 2 minute delay.

But hang on....Winlogon Notification Packages have been removed in Vista+ haven't they?

As it turns out they haven't been removed entirely, you still have Winlogon Notification subscribers registering for Winlogon Notifications under the WinlogonNotifiers key (the GPClient and TermSrv components do this for example)....but the integration with Network Providers that existed in XP/2003 has been removed.

For example: if Group Policy processing is taking a long time you may see the following:

The winlogon notification subscriber <GPClient> took 599 second(s) to handle the notification event (StartShell).

Winlogon Notification Packages
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa380545(VS.85).aspx

Customizing Winlogon
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa375198(VS.85).aspx

Winlogon and GINA
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa380543(VS.85).aspx

Winlogon Notification Packages Removed: Impact on Windows Vista Planning and Deployment
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc721961(WS.10).aspx

Winlogon notification packages do not work after you upgrade to Windows Vista
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/925519