Question : Long logon delay, upto 15min when logging into domain from ALL clients.

I have an issue that seems to have surfaced prior to the restoration of my primary domain controller. During the restoration the PDC was demoted and the another DC was elected. After restoration, the DC was re-elected to put the network to the same essential state it was before resoration.  Some background on my enviroment:

Public School District with 5 buildings. These buildings are part of a MAN connected via wireless. This system has been in place and working for over 2 years, so please do not troubleshoot this portion. Each building has its own DC, 5 in total. All clients are XP, with many group policy aspects applied, including mandated profiles for students - NOT ROAMING. All Staff have laptops with LOCAL profiles, but sycnronized HomeDrives.

There are no apparent DNS issues, nor connectivity issues. This problem ONLY occurs at the school where the PDC resides. I have found that the DC's authenticating the clients in question are NOT the local DC, but DC's in the other buildings 15 miles away. I beleive this is where my problem lies.

How do the clients define what DC to authenticate against, and how can I force, or correct the issue so that the clients use the local DC?

Thank You for your help!!

Answer : Long logon delay, upto 15min when logging into domain from ALL clients.

Are you running Sites and Services?  Typically if you want a certain set of PCs to use a specific DC then you will define a subnet in Sites and Services and add a specific DC for use from that subnet.  Your setup would look something like this:

Building one
     Servers
           Building one DC

Building two
     Servers
           Building two DC

In the properties of each subnet you would define which sites it belongs to (Building one, Building two, etc.)

This should limit which DCs each location uses for logon authentication.