cluberti

What you've done is probably the best solution, without breaking anything .

No, it wouldn't. We would suggest what I just suggested.

What is the %domainname% variable pointing to? If it's an FQDN, the domain join will also fail. Perhaps hard-coding it (for testing purposes) may tell us more?

The firewall in Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 is inbound-only. There is currently no way to block outbound traffic with the built-in OS tools, and you will need a third party software product to do this at the OS level. Windows Vista will include a two-way firewall, but Windows XP and 2003 do not (and likely will not get that feature either).

The Setup*.log files in the Windows directory should show what (if anything) was logged during the install.

I believe IPSwitch makes a 64bit FTP server.

Is SP1 installed? With SP1 installed, DirectMusic is completely removed from the server. You are going to need to uninstall DirectX, and reinstall DirectX 9.0b (not 9.0c) to keep DirectMusic. Otherwise: Use DirectX Happy Uninstall v3.4 (http://www.majorgeeks.com/download4347.html) - not free 1. Boot into safe mode 2. Use "Backup/Restore" option in DirectX Happy Uninstall and select restore from CD - This puts Windows Server back to DirectX 8.1 3. Download the redist version of DirectX 9.0c, and extract the install files to a folder (do not install) 4. Use the "Backup/Restore" option in DirectX Happy Uninstall and select the "Install DirectX 9.0c for Windows Server 2003 SP1" I've tried it (got it from somewhere else on the 'net, but I can't remember where) and it works. However, it'll likely be removed again with the next DX update, so don't lose these instructions .

The server service.

sure it can read it, but it can't copy it if it's open. The file is basically the HKCU key of the user's profile, and there are quite a few memory-mapped registry keys in that hive. Just because you can read some file doesn't mean you can copy it.

"CreateComputerAccountInDomain = No" Since we're using the "old" NT4-style domain join in a Winnt.sif file, this is technically what is causing your issue. It needs to add the machine to the domain AND write the SID to the computer account. If you remove this option, it should start working again. Are the computer accounts prestaged in the AD console for RIS?

If you remove or deny someone's ability to delete files, they lose the ability to delete files - thus, if you use an application (like Word) that creates temp files in the location the document is opened in, you will not be able to delete the temp files once Word is closed. Remember, the temp file is still a file, and the user won't have the ability to remove files!!! There's no way around this - if you remove the ability to delete files, the user won't be able to delete files. Either create the files elsewhere and store them in the location later, or don't use an application that needs temp files . If you've got a Windows Server 2003 server that is hosting these files, you may be better off enabling the Volume Shadow Copy features of the OS, so if the user deletes a file they can restore it themselves (within reason), without resorting to tape. Removing a user's ability to delete files in their own directories creates all sorts of trouble with applications, especially Office. It would be better to use something like VSC rather than a draconian rights removal, but that's just my opinion.

Not a problem - keep us posted as to what you find. I'm interested to know if you have a memory leak, or this is just normal behavior.

The RIS options are in the user configuration container of your GPO, so the server matters less than the user account used to run RIS. If the user account is in a GPO that doesn't have the custom option enabled, then you won't get that option on a RIS server. If you want to enable this for all of your RIS servers in your domain, you should probably make this setting enabled in your default domain policy, rather than lower-level user policies.

Works just fine here, with many Server 2003 SP1 (and now some Server 2003 R2) RIS servers - I'd say the problem lies not within RIS, but somewhere else in your AD. Does the user account you are using have the rights to add machines to the domain?

Go to office.microsoft.com and download the Office resource kit for your version of Office. You'll find all of the settings you'd like to change in either the Custom Installation Wizard (to set the options during install) or the Custom Maintenance Wizard (to change options on an installed version of Office).

You can't copy an ntuser.dat file that's in use, meaning if you're logged in as the administrator you can't copy the administrator's profile . Create a new admin user, log in with that user, and THEN copy the profile to a network location. Now, you can simply call a script that copies the ntuser.dat file from the network location (or a location on your install CD) to the "%systemdrive%\Documents and Settings\Default User" folder automatically during the build.

In the GPO: \Computer Configuration\Administrative Templates\Network Connections\Windows Firewall\Domain Profile Set the "Windows Firewall: Protect all network connections" setting to disabled.

Bootvis may help, but you may also want to look into using UPHClean (User Profile Hive Cleanup service) - not only will it speed up your boot times, it'll log in the event log what it had to do to force your user's registry to unload, and what the culprit is that is likely causing your problems. http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details...&displaylang=en Note that most slow shutdown issues are caused by (surprise) print drivers and antivirus software holding your registry open, and not relinquishing control over open keys. UPHClean forces a registry unload, which bandaids the shutdown process until you can fix the root cause (which you'll see in the logs, if UPHClean has to do it's thing).

That is not really a good way to determine a memory leak, because some applications will allocate more memory as they run, and it may be normal usage patterns - if he has any applications running as services, or applications running in the background, this isn't entirely abnormal. Also, if he has enabled DEP (and it's enabled unless you disable it manually, so there's a good chance it's enabled), there'll be more memory swings as well. You really should use perfmon to track memory usage over a good period of time (days, weeks even) to determine if you actually have a leak, or if your memory fluctuations are just that - fluctuations. Download the perfwiz utility here, to make sure you've configured perfmon properly: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details...&displaylang=en Run that, and leave it running for as long as your computer will stay up and running while you use it. Once you've gathered a good amount of data, stop the log and review it in perfmon, especially the memory and process counter objects - THOSE will tell you if you have a memory or handle leak, where the leak is occurring, and what process is causing it. Good luck .

The LANG folder contains all of the user interfaces for languages other than English (or, for localized versions, languages other than the localized version). These languages are for the user interface, they aren't the MUI's (IE or Office) nor the IE language packs for viewing different character sets in IE. If you don't plan on changing your OS language from the original, you can safely delete this folder.

It's a VBS script.

Be careful with this - there's no error checking. It'll go into a directory and delete all files that are older than 30 days without warning! Option Explicit on error resume next Dim objFSO Dim sDirectoryPath Dim objFolder Dim objFileCollection Dim objFile Dim iDaysOld 'Set the number of days to go back iDaysOld = 30 Set objFSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject") 'The sDirectoryPath can be a local folder or a \\server\share sDirectoryPath = "\\MyServer\MyFolder" set objFolder = objFSO.GetFolder(sDirectoryPath) set objFileCollection = objFolder.Files 'If any file is older than iDaysOld value, then delete it. For each objFile in objFileCollection If objFile.DateLastModified < (Date() - iDaysOld) Then objFile.Delete(True) End If Next 'Finish up Set objFSO = Nothing Set objFolder = Nothing Set objFileCollection = Nothing Set objFile = Nothing

This is a design of the terminal services portion of the server, not the client. If you do not configure group policy, the terminal server will kick the screensaver off after a minute or two, depending on your idle time and server load. If you configure group policy with screen saver options, it will use those up to 10 minutes - anything over 10 minutes will be ignored, and the screensaver will kick in after 10 minutes. You also cannot change the screensaver - it is configured within the terminal services of the server to only use the default Windows screensaver. Any reason you'd want to use a busy screensaver like marquee? That's a lot of network traffic to display a screensaver, when likely no one at the other end is even there to see it! Sorry, but the behavior you are seeing is "by design". If you need more functionality, use a Citrix server.

I agree with the nForce statement - one of my clients, who builds his own machines for his environment, has switched entirely to MSI boards based on the ATI Xpress 200 chipset due to the problems with nForce 3 and now 4 boards. The nForce 3 NICs were doable with some work, but the NICs on the nForce 4 boards have been impossible to get working via RIS, so they were finally out the door in favor of the (easy) realtek NICs on the MSI boards.

First, download Perfwiz: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details...&displaylang=en Use the wizard to start performance monitoring on your server, but make sure you select the "High CPU" option to capture thread information. Don't select the "Terminal Server" or "Exchange Server" options when prompted either, as these will skew the results. Stop the logs after awhile and take a good look at the performance log file(s) that were created - you should get some indication as to what is using memory in the winlogon.exe process. If you need to dig deeper, let me know and I can give some more assistance.