When using folder redirection, users might experience a long delay. Issue might first be seen in a trace when there is a delay between starting winlogon.exe and userinit.exe.

The following are the three options for a quicker logon in this situation in order of precedence:

Option 1

You can resolve this issue by modifying the following registry entry, which controls the time wait.

Caution! Refer to the Disclaimer at the end of this article before using Registry Editor.

HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer

FolderRedirectionWait (REG_DWORD) in milliseconds

Default value is 5000 milliseconds or 5 seconds for each folder.

Valid values would be from 0 to as high as you want to go which would be the DWORD maximum.

Note: We can set this value to 0 if there is no wait desired or as low as about 1000 which would be up to 1 second wait per folder.

Option 2

Pre-create the target redirected folders so that they are over 5 seconds old when the redirection occurs.

Option 3

Clear the Move contents... checkbox on each of the redirected folders. Side effect of this is that the folders can remain in the user's profile where they can see duplicated names when viewing the user's files.

Note: You can delete these files without causing any harm after the redirection is successful.

Problem Cause

It is normal to see the delay in processing folder redirection policy for the first time. The reason for this delay is because, the option “move content…” is selected and it tries to copy the data over to the server. The amount of data within the folder is not the cause for the delay. For each redirected folder that is created and moved, there is up to five-second default pause to allow for possible server quotas to apply to the user on that server, before any data is attempted to be copied.

For example, if you have 12 folders that need to be created, the delay will be 60 seconds, that is 12 folders x 5 seconds = 60 seconds.