[German]A German blog reader contacted me the other day because he noticed a very crude effect under Windows 10 and Windows 11 in his enterprise environment. The user logon to the user account sometimes takes a very long time, namely when employees switch from the company network to the home office and want to log on there with the notebooks. I'll post this case here in the blog – maybe someone from the readership knows something about it or has an idea why the described effect occurs.
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What is AppReadiness?
AppReadiness is a Win32 service that is started only when the user, an application or another service starts it. The service prepares applications for use when a user logs on to this PC for the first time and when he adds new applications. If the startup type is mistakenly set to automatic, slow startup and logon processes occur on Windows clients.
The slow login issue
German blog reader Marius L. is responsible for the administration of clients within a company. The company's employees are equipped with notebooks, which are sometimes logged into the company network, but are also used by employees at home. Marius described his problem as follows (I've translated the text):
Windows AppReadiness and slow login
Hello Günter,
I turn again with a new phenomenon, which occurs with us lately ever more frequently, to you. Namely, it could be described as follows:
When our employees want to log in with their user at home on the day after their stay in the company network, the logon and the opening of all programs etc. sometimes takes up to 30 minutes.
The problem can be fixed temporarily by rebooting countless times, or disconnecting the computer from any network, or stopping the AppReadiness service via the task manager.
Marius then tried various things without really seeing any improvement. In addition he wrote the following:
We have also tried already setting the following registry entries to solve the problem, but unfortunately this did not help either.
reg add "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer" /v "AppReadinessPreShellTimeoutMs" /t REG_DWORD /d "0x7530" /f
reg add "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System" /v "FirstLogonTimeout" /t REG_DWORD /d "0x1e" /f
reg add "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System" /v "DelayedDesktopSwitchTimeout" /t REG_DWORD /d "0x1e" /f The problem occurs on different Dell Latitude or Precision models, Windows 10 21H2 as well as Windows 11 21H2.
Marius said "Maybe more have these problems from the community and you could maybe address this", which I did herewith. I asked him, it the issue described in the blog post Windows: Login to client in a domain extremely slow because of TEMP files could be the problem, but he answered that it doesn't help.
Issues with AppReadiness reported elsewhere
The problem isn't all that new, as a quick search revealed. In April 2021, a user already asks in this forum post for a method to speed up the slow login processes.
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Any Method for fixing slow login due to App Readiness?
A couple of days ago my local account on my HP laptop(20H2 Windows Version) started taking 5 to 10 mins to log in and in the mean time it would show a black screen with a cursor. I then found out this is due to the App Readiness service on boot up and disabling this would cause everything to go back to normal.
However I would rather it stay on as it was working fine before and I was just wondering was there any fix for this? I have downloaded all the login fixes that HP have uploaded but none of these ended up working and I have made sure that my App Readiness service is set to manual only. This is quite a frustrating issue as the other local accounts on this machine work just fine and it seems that only my account is affected. Is there any known solution apart from the fixes provided by HP and turning off App Readiness?
There are also several posts on reddit.com like this one, with no solution offered (aside from disabling the service). RDS farms also did this in 2022, as you can read on reddit.com. In that post, FXLogix is mentioned on as a possible cause. It says there that the "state repository" for apps gets bloated over time. The article author gives the tip to reset this repository using a PowerShell script. Also in this Techcommunity forum post FXLogix is mentioned as a problem (partly with black screen).
Has the above behavior been observed by you guys as well? If so, does anyone know of a cause or fix?
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