You May Experience Logon Delay After Installing Directory Services Client on Windows 95 or Windows 98

After you install the Windows 2000 Directory Services client for Windows 95 or Windows 98, you may experience a 15 second or longer delay when you log on to the domain.

This behavior may occur if the following conditions are true:

• The NetBIOS name of the Windows 2000 domain does not match the DNS name of the Windows 2000 domain.
• Only the TCP/IP protocol is installed on the Windows 95-based or Windows 98-based computer.
• The DNS server that the Windows 95-based or Windows 98-based computer is configured to use has the following attribute settings, which are the default settings for a Windows 2000 DNS server:
  • No forwarder is configured.
  • The Disable Recursive option is not selected.

If the delay is longer than 15 seconds, the Windows 95-based or Windows 98-based computer may be configured with multiple DNS server addresses that are not valid, resulting in multiple DNS query timeouts. This situation is typically caused by outdated DHCP options. To identify this problem, use the 'ping' command on the Windows 95-based or Windows 98-based computer to confirm if each of the configured DNS servers exists. To obtain the list of DNS servers for the Windows 95-based or Windows 98-based computer, use the Winipcfg.exe tool. For additional information, click the following article numbers to view the articles in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

To work around the behavior, add a fictitious DNS zone that has the same name as the NetBIOS domain name. When you do this, the DNS server immediately returns a "Name does not exist" message to the Windows 95-based or Windows 98-based computer.

WARNING: If you use Registry Editor incorrectly, you may cause serious problems that may require you to reinstall your operating system. Microsoft cannot guarantee that you can solve problems that result from using Registry Editor incorrectly. Use Registry Editor at your own risk.

To work around longer delays caused by DNS query timeouts against multiple DNS server addresses that are not valid, delete the registry keys for all DNS server addresses. To do this, follow these steps:

1. Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then click OK.
2. Locate and then click the following key in the registry
   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\VxD\DHCP\DhcpInfo<##>
   where <##> is a number from 00 to 99.
3. On the Edit menu, click Delete, and then click Yes.
4. Repeat steps 2 and 3 to delete the DhcpInfo<##> key for each DNS server address.

For additional information about how to modify the registry, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: If the registry contains a lot of DhcpInfo<##> keys, you may want to use a registry (.reg) file to delete the DhcpInfo<##> keys. The following text shows the contents of a sample .reg file. To create a .reg file to remove all the DhcpInfo<##> keys, replace the ellipses (...) in the following example with lines for "Dhcpinfo09" through "Dhcpinfo98". For additional information about how to use a .reg file to add or remove registry entries, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: NOTE: If you use either of these methods to remove all the DhcpInfo<##> keys, the Windows 95-based or Windows 98-based computer must request a new DHCP lease the next time you restart the computer.

Client computers use DNS SRV records to locate Windows 2000 domain controllers. Windows 2000 domain controllers use the following format to register their SRV records with DNS: The Windows 2000 Directory Services Client for Windows 95 or Windows 98 uses the NetBIOS domain name instead of the DNS domain name to issue a query to the DNS server in the following format: For example, if the DNS domain name is adatum.com, the Windows 2000 Directory Services Client for Windows 95 or Windows 98 requests the DNS server to resolve the query instead of the following query: