I’m writing with reference to an ex-colleague’s blog post where he found a very useful fix for a very annoying start up and log-on delay issue in Windows 7 SP1. Here’s his post, worth a read:
http://blog.solarfusion.co.uk/2011/12/windows-7-please-wait-or-welcome-screen.html (not SSL)
We were finding that computers in shared areas which had been logged on by many users (i.e. 50+ user profiles) were experiencing massive delays starting up and logging on. Until he found the fix the only solution was to leave the computers on all the time, or get them to start up really early in the morning.
One fix we tried was removing all the user profiles from the computers, and this only worked some of the time. Then my colleague found the right hot-fix and all of a sudden our startup and logon times dropped back to a few minutes. Big relief!
Here’s the relevant article: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/2617858/unexpectedly-slow-startup-or-logon-process-in-windows-server-2008-r2-o
See the blog entry (linked above) for a detailed explanation.