Windows 2003 Terminal Server hangs on reboot

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Kees Baggerman·Senior Technical Director at Nutanix – Former Citrix CTP – NVIDIA Enterprise Platform Advisor – 15+ years in EUC

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One of our customers had a problem with Windows 2003 Terminal Servers that would hang on a grey screen before the logon prompt after a reboot, one of my colleagues got tsdiag.exe from Microsoft in order to diagnose the problem. After some research we discovered that the problem was resolved when the following reg keys are set:

DWordValue HKLM, “SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management”,”LargeSystemCache”, 0

DWordValue HKLM, “SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Configuration Manager”,”RegistryLazyFlushInterval”, 30

DWordValue HKLM, “SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\lanmanserver\parameters”,”Size “,3

LargeSystemCache explained..

RegistryLazyFlushInterval explained..

LanManServer explained..

Microsoft couldn’t explain why this could solve the problem on Windows 2003 Terminal Server but it did do the job. When you suffer the same symptoms please test these settings first before using this in a production environment.

I know lot’s of these configurations are already tested in all kind of scenario’s (as explained here and of course there’s the white paper by Dr Tritsch) but I like to start with a default installation and tweak and adjust per scenario rather than applying these adjustments to every environment because you could break something else in the process.

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Kees Baggerman

Kees Baggerman is Senior Technical Director — Performance & Solutions Engineering R&D at Nutanix, where he leads a global team responsible for defining how enterprise applications are delivered on the Nutanix platform. A former Citrix Technology Professional and NVIDIA Enterprise Platform Advisor, he has spent 15+ years driving EUC strategy and technical direction across architecture, product, and customer success. He has been writing here since 2011 — sharing what he learns at the intersection of platform engineering and enterprise IT.

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Kees Baggerman

Senior Technical Director at Nutanix - Former Citrix CTP - NVIDIA Enterprise Platform Advisor - 15+ years in EUC

Kees Baggerman is Senior Technical Director — Performance & Solutions Engineering R&D at Nutanix, where he leads a global team responsible for defining how enterprise applications are delivered on the Nutanix platform. A former Citrix Technology Professional and NVIDIA Enterprise Platform Advisor, he has spent 15+ years driving EUC strategy and technical direction across architecture, product, and customer success. He has been writing here since 2011 — sharing what he learns at the intersection of platform engineering and enterprise IT.

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