A common complaint I hear when working with customers who deploy applications and shared desktops in a Windows Server environment is the long length of time it can take for a user to log into the environment.  When troubleshooting, most administrators verify that all of the Citrix policy settings are correct, and even investigate the servers hardware for possible issues.  While all of these could cause this problem, something that most technicians fail to check are the Windows Group Policy settings that control the user's profile.

Most Citrix environments with this problem use roaming profiles to manage their employees files and folders.  While this is a good practice, using folder redirection along with roaming profiles typically yields the best results.  Folder redirection settings in Windows Server 2008 can be found in <em>User Configuration\Polices\Windows Settings\Folder Redirection</em>.

When using folder redirection along with roaming profiles, be sure to exclude the redirected folder from roaming by enabling the setting <em>User Configuration\Administrative Templates\System\User Profiles\Exclude directories from roaming profile</em>.  In the <em>Prevent the following directories from roaming with the profile</em> box type the list of folders that were set in the Folder Redirection policy.