I used to be a “digital signal is all 1’s and 0’s” and believed that a cable is a cable is a cable. Then I saw this video and, even though “digital” is 1’s and 0’s”, the electrical signal is still analog and can be manipulated.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFbJ...

Honestly, I feel AI (or LLMs) is the newer version of the book “How to win friends and influence people”. It’s about manipulation. Playing to people’s need for validation of their ideas or beliefs.

The original book had that as a concept, AI takes it 10 steps further with interactivity.

At this moment, I liken it to paying for TechNet… at least I think that’s what it was called…

Or paying for the old VMUG Advantage…

So… I guess I pay for multiple solutions.

ChatGPT hasn’t been strong for me in writing powershell, too may hallucinating in parameters, cmdlets and non-functional code. But for writing I find it being pretty good.

Claude, I’ve found very good about programming/coding/etc.

My experience is different products have different strengths

Been there a few times the last couple years myself 😝

I have Gemini but I personally pay for Claude and ChatGPT

If you can run psexec -i -s cmd.exe then you can impersonate a machine account on the network. Which might be problematic

That’s a good idea to remove any network latency, but it’s the application of FTA’s that’s slow. Reading the file (even over a high latency network) contributes the least amount of time to the process

I’ve wondered about removing all entries in the built in DFA, disabling the policy then use SetUserFTA to do the FTA application *after* logon.

setuserfta.com

Things to ponder. Thanks for coming to my logon duration rant!

I haven’t confirmed yet, but this may be another reason published apps are so much faster. I suspect they don’t have this second FTA application phase.

So… what can be done to speed this up?

Disabling the Default File Associations policy will still have the built in FTA applied…

This may not be 100% accurate, especially during the “real” User Profile Event phase as the User Profile Service can be doing other things. But for the FTA Explorer.exe starts, it does appear to be only FTA application.

When Explorer.exe applies FTA it appears to programmatically call the User Profile Service to do the application. So the only markers I can use appear to be AppDefaults UserProfileLoaded event, followed by all the FTA application events and then find the User Profile Service completed event.

I noted that Microsoft might be aware of this as they reduced the number of FTA’s built into Windows 10 Multisession used in AVD. I haven’t revisited it to see if it holds for Windows 11 Multi-session

www.controlup.com/resources/bl...

FTA’s application appears to be a slow process and in my test environment can take between 15-30 seconds. So doing it twice REALLY doesn’t help.

Both times the User Profile Service is doing the application of the FTA… but the second time the DFA XML file events are being Open and Closed by…. Explorer.exe

So it appears explorer.exe will apply DFA again.

Ugh. Why Microsoft, why?!

So just trace the FTA logs by username right? You’d think that would work… until I saw it applying all the same FTA’s TWICE! AND it will block logons the second time it’s applying them too!

WTF?

There does not appear to be any markers for when it starts and finishes applying FTA. But it does log each individual FTA being applied and has the user SID in the event.
In Procmon I can trace when it starts and completes by looking at the XML File Open and Close events.

I’ve been working on adding some new technologies to @controlup.com’s Analyze Logon Duration (www.controlup.com/script-libra...) and decided to work on adding this phase to the script. But I was frustrated by some weird things I was seeing.