In my Vista test environment, I am experiencing extremely long startup times (up to 14 minutes) when booting up outside of the domain, but connected to the Internet (like at home). It hangs at the "Please Wait" screen. After a great deal of troubleshooting and log parsing, I was able to determine that this was caused by startup scripts in my Group Policy. A representation of my Group Policy Operational logs are below. In this case, notice the 8 minute gap between events. If I remove all of the startup scripts from the Group Policies, the computer boots immediately. I was curious if anyone had an explanation on why Vista would try and execute a startup script when the domain is unavailable? NLA seems to have correctly identified the unavailability of my DCs (by a an 1129 event in the System Log a few seconds after boot up), but startup scripts still attempt to execute (at least that's what the logs tell me).
Log Name: Microsoft-Windows-GroupPolicy/Operational Source: Microsoft-Windows-GroupPolicy Date: 5/3/2007 10:07:22 AM Event ID: 4018 Starting Startup script for DOMAIN\COMPUTERNAME$.
Log Name: Microsoft-Windows-GroupPolicy/Operational Source: Microsoft-Windows-GroupPolicy Date: 5/3/2007 10:15:05 AM Event ID: 5018 Completed Startup script for DOMAIN\COMPUTERNAME$ in 462 seconds.
Joseph T. Corey Technical Lead MCSE, Security+

"Joseph T Corey"

Did you try posting this in vista.networking_sharing?
Lang

No, but I just posted to Windows.group_policy.
jc
"Lang Murphy"